Why DIY, anyway? As we prepare for a special Handmade Music afternoon hosted by Amsterdam’s STEIM research center, my co-curator Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff) asked me to answer that question. Here’s what I wrote for STEIM’s international Patterns and Pleasure festival.

“Do it yourself.”

In the world reshaped by recording, in which music is ubiqiutously available on demand and even bare-bones DJing qualifies as “live” entertainment, the act of just making music surely qualifies as “DIY.” Add the fact that distribution, promotion, and booking of music often falls increasingly on the artists themselves, and it’s hard to see any part of music that isn’t DIY.

So, given all that, what would drive artists to make or modify their own musical tools? One might as well ask why make music in the first place. (Because you can? Because it’s fun? Because it’s the most satisfying way to realize an idea or feeling – often the two together?) I believe some of the separation between “music” and “tools” or “gear” or “technology” is arbitrary. That independence is itself a recording-centric notion, in which musical content as artifact is imagined as independent from how it was made. During the process of production or performance, they’re inseparable. The evolution of musical practice, meanwhile, is intertwined with the technology of playing and representing music. Musical instruments in archaeological records appear alongside the first human tools. Those instruments, like the musical materials themselves, are vessels for expression of human thought. We can make our body an instrument, via percussion or voice, but as with so many other elements of our human life, we extend that body through invention.

When you play an instrument, whether a flute or an interactive music software patch, what you express is mediated both through musical language and the tool. I know as a child, it was what first drew me to music: I could press my fingers to the keys and hear something very much other than what I could produce myself. It’s easy to see the connection to the synthesizer and the computer.

When you want to realize (or discover) new musical and sonic ideas, then, it’s necessary to become involved with the way in which those sounds are produced. As composers for acoustic instruments and voice, you dive into the realms of harmony and rhythm, but also the mechanisms of the instruments and standard and extended techniques. Working with the computer, you employ interfaces – whether simulated knobs or code or graphical representation – to realize your ideas. With electronics, wires and resistors and diodes become compositional. With both, the container you fashion, the handcrafted cases or user interfaces, becomes part of the musical identity you design.

There is no such thing as an instrument built from scratch. To quote Isaac Newton (in words adapted by countless electrical engineers and computer scientists), “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We inherit a great body of knowledge and tooling. Whether a commercial DAW or a modular development environment or the circuit that makes a filter, we connect with the ideas, imagination, and expertise of generations of engineer-artists. Notably, we lost Max Mathews this year, whose lasting legacy, even more than breakthroughs in computer synthesis, may be his influence on decades of students and colleagues in chasing the limitless potential he saw in digital sound. Thought is the greatest technology there is.

I think we can easily become overly worried about the rise of digital tech. Computers and electronics are here, and for all their dangers – misuse and toxic waste being foremost among them – they are fundamentally a compilation of human ideas. If you like people, you’ll like computers and circuits when you get to know them. We can also become overly concerned with “new”; the great implication of the maturity of electronic sound technology to me is that we can begin to go from novelty to repeatability and expertise. That’s not to discount discovery; it’s simply that discovery can’t exist in a void. At the same time, in our appetite for mastery, we can devalue the novice. I’m excited by seeing projects that don’t quite work yet, that are only at the stage of technical demo or proof of concept, because to me it’s seeing the first steps on a path that could lead a musician into years of practice and refinement. It’s seeing the chicken popping out of the egg. Potential is stimulating when you believe it has a future.

Here, designing one’s own instruments is much like learning to play an instrument. You repeat the ideas of others, just as you repeat the sounds of others when you learn a musical scale. You make sounds that, at first, are, well, awful, but that then grow up. Whether arguably innovative or not, you make discoveries that are inherently personal. And the degree of that progression is dependent in large part on learning from others, playing with them and sharing their experience. As people share that experience, in the end there are breakthroughs to the genuinely new. Collective progress is what allows those individual eurekas.

With economies from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam slowing, with growing unfilled demand for the ability to actually make stuff and not just push abstract numbers around, and with technical problems that demand solutions literally to ensure our survival, all those strange noises we make take on a new meaning. Tools and technology enabled our civilization; now we need them to make humanity sustainable. Silly sounds and musicians’ racket and din may seem distant from that. But we can sing this necessity as a song. We can celebrate the spirit of experimentation by making things that make immediate noise. A bridge or a jet plane isn’t a great place for experimentation or on-the-job learning; music is the perfect playground because errors are always okay. If any community could help encourage free innovation in our culture, music is a strong candidate; today’s young synth builder could be tomorrow photo-voltaic breakthrough. And even if not, we’ll make a wonderful noise.

“Open source” and the “Web” are significant tools to make sharing expertise easier, but at the fundamental level, it’s simply “sharing” that matters. And this is where music’s makers and inventors are helping resurrect the principles of music as community. We have to share ideas and sounds to be able to move forward.

We do it ourselves, together.

CDM is a presenting sponsor of the IMSTA FESTA in New York on Saturday. It’s a completely free event, but registration is required. What’s notable about this sort of event is that it tends to be more directly musician-focused than big conferences like AES or the truly trade-only NAMM. Some of the highlights of which we’re taking note:

• Vendor presentations by Native Instruments, Steinberg, Celemony, Propellerhead, Image Line, Waves, and Cakewalk should all be interesting as they all have new products, and say they’ll be showing some of them off. (Also present: McDSP, Pianoteq, SSL, and others.)
• Legendary producer Hank Shocklee’s Shocklee “Innertainment” is involed, including talented chief Jo-Ann Nina.
• Web music is front and central, including a look at the future of music platforms with our friend Oliver Chesler of the blog Wire to the Ear (with whom I’ve panelized a couple of times now), and Evolver.fm’s Eliot Van Buskirk. The CEO of Tunecore is on-hand, as is new cloud backup and sharing service for musicians Gobbler.
• Production is there, too – think Hank moderating a panel with industry heavies on mixing pop, and teaching his own master class, plus drum programming.

http://www.imsta.org/imsta_festa.php

Here’s the catch: normally, covering New York events is easy because I’ve been based in New York. But I’m currently on the road and based in Berlin for most of the remainder of 2011. So, if anyone wants to go and do some investigative research, take some video or the like, let me know!

Read last year’s write-up by Oliver on the panel I moderated:
imsta festa panel review [wiretotheear]

One other question, for the whole world and not just New York: what would your dream event look like? Where would it be? Would it be a mix of workshops and events? With so many events (Music Hack Days, trade shows, and the like), what aren’t you getting from present events? (Asia, Pacific, South America, Africa, interested in hearing from you, too, if you’re out there… not just Europe and North America.)

No specific context, but I do find the question comes up a lot.

Sound and music for games is already a growing frontier for professional music careers; mobile, then, triply so. But with the expanded opportunities come unique challenges. Learning about them requires real-world experience, and short of word of mouth, that kind of knowledge is often scarce – even in the Web age.

Composer, sound designer, and audio director Ben Long has put his sonic thumbprints on games and TV networks alike, and has recently turned his attention to sharing some of the industry secrets of the mobile realm, with work in game design textbooks and GDC China. Now, he has a new book entitled “Game Audio 101: Mobile” that assembles all that experience into a single reference. Launched at South by Southwest Interactive, it could prove invaluable to people aspiring in this area.

What’s especially unique about this title is not only its focus, but its insights into real-world case studies – fairly legendary ones, at that. Long gets tips and background on the making of sound for hit titles Angry Birds (iOS, Android), music app Drumkit (iOS), and RPG hit The Harvest (Windows Phone).

Nor is this generalist advice, painted in vague, broad strokes. There are specifics of platforms (not only iOS, but Windows Phone and Android), sound design technique, technical information, and career advice. Covered in the book:

• Basics of the mobile market, MIDI and mobile design
• Anatomy of specific titles and the techniques they used to make effective music and sound direction
• Particulars of everything from looping to sound cues, coupled with interviews with sound designers
• Tips on improving sound design, catering to specific platforms, and managing your career and negotiations

I should caution that this is more of a white paper of assembled research and tips than a front-to-back textbook. My one complaint is, therefore, it does feel a bit abridged, under fifty pages. There’s sometimes a copy-and-paste sense to the content, as well, in case you’re expecting something with the level of polish of, say, an O’Reilly e-book. The tips you can glean from it, though, could be worth the price of admission if this is a field about which you’re serious – and a lot more than you’d get out of a similarly-priced workshop or the massive cost of attending conferences. You’ll have to do a little digging – the title really picks up somewhere about halfway through – but you could easily get some nuggets that could transform a career.

To make things easier, we have a CDM-only discount code for readers, bringing the price down 50% off its current sale price to just $19.95. Enter the following code at checkout:
AT101ebooksxsw45

More information:

http://www.gameaudio101.com/about_book.php

Ben Long has also written a terrific reference exclusively for CDM, from January – much shorter than the book, but good if you want a taste of his writing:
Creating in 2011: A Composers’ View of Mobile Game Audio, From Trends to Slot Machine Sound Design

Let us know what you think – and definitely if you happen to get a good gig in the industry.

Same as it ever was:

With talk of the cloud, streams, special proprietary devices that pipe vendor-specific sounds to particular home stereos, intelligent, always-on access to entire music collections, tablets and set-top boxes and … all of that … it can be tough to look into the future of music and audio. I spent the last weekend at Project Bar-B-Q, a mind-bending retreat of audio tech industry sages and engineers, on a team that looked at the issue. It’s not time yet to share those discussions, but as we face the dizzying array of possibilities ahead, this one quote stands out, pointed to me by someone in my BBQ group.

The article is from June, but as “cloud music” talk heats up, it’s worth pasting to your wall. The ever-insightful Sasha Frere-Jones writes for The New Yorker

…the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car.

Full story: You, the D.J.: Online music moves to the cloud.

I think a corollary is that, even with the big box playing music for free, people will want to own a collection of music and own things they take around with them, alongside the free things. Exactly where that line falls and in what way remains the sticking point.

But why stop at music listening, or even music creation? The idea above could lend perspective to any conversation about design and technology. The dimensions of the virtual, digital universe and its possibilities are indeterminate and difficult to conceive. But the dimensions of human beings are not.

I look at my Android phone and iPod touch and see something that rests comfortably in the palm of my hand. Keyboards and pianos sit before me at waist height and stretch within reach of my arms. The netbook to which I’ve just taken a strong liking I notice is the near exact size and weight of one of my favorite paper sketchbooks from a few years ago. It folds under my arm. (The dimensions of an airline coach row are applicable here, too, but one could think of those as the economic extensions of how closely you can pack humans and still get them to buy tickets.) The iPad, embraced recently by musicians, is sized to a music stand and could easily replicate manuscript paper, which in turn could be the net of multiplying staves sized to human hands and handwritten dexterity. The ubiquitous knob may be just an endcap on the electrically-convenient potentiometer, but it’s also a physical manifestation of the fact that human beings have opposable thumbs. The grip of your hand is, literally, the reason we talk about “tweaking.”

It’s not just a matter of ergonomics, though if design causes discomfort or you can’t see a user interface, that obviously matters. Human scale is part of what allows us to grow emotionally attached to certain things.

And it should also be apparent that while the tech headlines and reporting focus on platforms or vendors — Apple! iPhone! Cable TV box! BMW car stereo! — humans, quietly, keep using objects that are fundamentally more or less the same. The rest is just a bit of icing. It makes you wonder why we don’t ask the fundamental questions first and worry about the details later, instead of the other way around. That would bring some humanity, sanity, and a longer view to technological discussions. (A shock, I know.)

Think in human terms, and sometimes design answers or the future of music are within arm’s reach. Just ask an accordion.

For some time, the move has seemed inevitable – even more so as the rumor mill started echoing with suggestions that a native release was coming. But now, it’s happened: Pro Tools HD will now run without HD DSP hardware. And that’s not all — you can also use the same hardware with your existing DAW of choice, for users of software like Cubase and Logic.

There’s a price tag attached, though. This remains what for many would be a high-end solution. At US$3495 retail and up, it’s not competition for buying a basic interface card and Cubase. Think, instead, a more affordable and flexible way to equip studio rigs, and some potentially serious competition for vendors like Apogee, especially since you can use any DAW you want.

Just to say that again: Avid is making a version of Pro Tools HD that runs on the CPU and supports any DAW on Windows 7 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard and higher.

The AIR (Avid) user blog has some terrific analysis on the announcement even before it became public, comparing leaked price info for Native to an Apogee rig. If you haven’t been reading the AIR blog, they’ve hardly been shills for Avid; they’ve savaged some of the company’s decisions. And they’re actually pretty positive here. (Spoiler: Avid winds up being cheaper than Apogee by a few hundred bucks in their calculus.)
Is An Avid Pro Tools HD Native Core System Expensive?

What you get for that investment, though, is something worth discussing. It also reveals what’s necessary to get real, low-latency audio operation, which is relevant even if you aren’t in the market for Pro Tools|HD Native. CDM gets some insight into that from the developers.

First, Pro Tools|HD Native at a glance. Bundles:

Native core: $3495 buys you the necessary PCIe native card plus Pro Tools HD 8.5 software. The card comes with two Digilink mini ports on it.

Native core + OMNI Add an HD OMNI interface to the above. Total: US$5995.

Native core + HD I/O 8x8x8 Get a full 8x8x8 HD I/O interface. Total cost: US$6995.

Native core + HD I/O 16×16 analog US$7995.

Availability: November 4.

So, why bother with “HD Native” when there are versions like LE? The difference is that some of the more serious studio features remain:

• Surround, VCA mixing
• Destructive/track punch, advanced automation
• Solo Bus AFL/PFL, track-based input monitoring
• Sync HD support
• 9-pin Machine Control
• Venue support. (Yeah, that’s pretty huge, since Venue rigs don’t necessarily need all the TDM stuff.

This isn’t a TDM solution, though, so you don’t get TDM plug-in support, which for many is one of the big draws of Pro Tools. That includes the recently-announced HEAT, an analog-modeling sonic sweetener based on the qualities of tape. (There’s more to say about HEAT; I just got off the phone with its talented designer Dave Hill, so expect the results of that interview soon.)

It is a significant “mid-range” studio solution, and will likely fill a big need for Pro Tools customers. Avid told CDM in a briefing yesterday that they’ve gotten enormous demand for just such a solution. Just doing a discounted upgrade to HD got a big response, and users have wanted something between LE and the TDM-based HD for project or secondary studios. It also seems to me that it demonstrates Avid is willing to change, which could have greater implications down the road.

What you get is, says Avid, not a replacement for their DSP solutions, but otherwise unrestricted in sync, I/O, and functionality. It has the mixing and I/O LE lacks, and it even supports legacy “blue” HD converters (192, etc.), making it a likely candidate for upgrading studio setups that didn’t make the leap to 8.5 software.

If you don’t want to use Pro Tools as your DAW, you get 64 channels of I/O with any Core Audio (Mac) or ASIO (PC) system. Avid says they’ve tested extensively with Logic and Nuendo; Digital Performer, SONAR, and others should work, too.

And, notably, it’s a native system with extraordinarily low latency. Pro Tools|HD does .44 ms (at 96k and a 64 sample — yes, sixty-four total – buffer). But HD Native does a very respectable 1.6 ms; less than half that if you choose direct monitoring while recording, which you can do with simple stereo monitoring or even 7.1 surround setups. That’s 1.6 ms through the native setup, through PCI, and through the kernel and operating system. We’ve heard those kinds of theoretical numbers, but it’s a big deal to get it consistently on a computer system with a single, stable setup.

The Latency Story

I was curious to hear more about how Pro Tools|HD Native achieves those low latencies. The answer says something about the direction of Pro Tools, but also the potential of native computers for this sort of processing in general, regardless of the tool you use. (And that’s the sort of information we like.)

Bobby Lombardi, head of Pro Tools Product Management, explains to CDM:

The magic answer to all this is the Core Audio/ASIO “safety buffer” which is an additional layer of latency used by third party IO manufacturers (HW) manufacturers who provide Core Audio drivers for their HW. We also use a safety buffer for all of our hardware (including LE and M-Audio) that have Core Audio and ASIO drivers.

A safety buffer can have a very wide range of values. PCIe based hardware IO is the best case where manufacturers could theoretically get down to a 9 sample buffer, and go as high as several hundred samples for USB devices.

The key for a high-performance, low-latency system is PCIe-based IO and quality low-latency converters. This is the main reason why a PCI-based Pro Tools HD Native system combined with an HD IO has such exceptional latency.

The story gets even better at 96kHz sample rates where most converter latencies where the host CPU latency halves itself, and many high-end converters are capable of a low-latency converter mode without sacrificing quality. Our new HD IO and OMNI IO have such converters and perform in a low-latency performance mode when used at 88.2 and higher sample rates.

So to recap. The best possible latency story for Pro Tools HD Native using AD/DA converters is:

Pro Tools HD Native
Pro Tools HD Software @ 96kHz, 64 sample playback buffer
HD IO or HD OMNI interfaces

If anyone wants to get deeper into these issues with Avid (or anyone else), let me know; I’m game.

Don’t Write Off TDM Yet

Worth saying: this is probably good news for the future of DSP-based, TDM Pro Tools systems, not bad. The business advantage for Avid is, they sell more hardware and software, and keep more people on their platform. (I don’t think they can be faulted for that.)

But if you’re wondering, why bother with the pricier TDM systems at all, the story there doesn’t really change. As Avid puts it, TDM’s advantages don’t suffer when your CPU becomes more powerful. That just means you can use all the horsepower of the CPU and all the additional DSP processing of the HD TDM iron. Some of their customers are also using pretty extreme use cases, like recording 500 channels a time of a symphony orchestra. (I got an angry note regarding Logic Pro after writing a review of Apple’s DAW for Macworld where someone complained that Logic was choking over just sort a setup. Naturally, as a home producer, I had neither tested – nor could really conceive – what that setup looked like.)

There’s also time. Developing highly-optimized TDM plug-ins in Assembler is a different game from writing RTAS (or VST, or AU, etc.) plug-ins in C, and not everyone will port from one to the other.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that some of these issues transcend usage scenarios, budget, and the like. I don’t doubt that every musician would love 1.5 ms latency. And those fundamental architectural issues I believe will continue to be relevant for the entire musical community – whether their tools count as particularly “Pro” or not.

Nashville locals Jeremy Dickens (logickal) and Tony Youngblood were on-site this month for CDM to cover the Nashville’s NAMM show, the summer installment of the major music manufacturer trade show.

The Summer 2010 edition of the North American Music Merchants trade show (Summer NAMM to most of us) has come and gone. For three days in humid downtown Nashville, members of the gear manufacturing, distribution, and retailing businesses converged upon the convention center to see the latest new merchandise being brought to market. This year, however, they did so against the backdrop of a city whose economy faces an uncertain future in the wake of the devastating flooding that displaced thousands of people and did billions of dollars in property damage.

In the background, there were some interesting signs regarding the uneasy state of the industry as a whole. According to the official numbers, overall attendance was down by 4% from last year, although overall exhibitor numbers were “slightly up.” It wasn’t difficult to overhear the disappointment and frustration in the conversations of sales people on the show floor. Michael Fine, a representative for guitar brands such as G&L and ESP, was quoted by the local media as saying that “Everybody’s sales were down at least 25 percent last year, mine included.”

NAMM music gear trade show is ‘hurting’ this year [Tennessean.com]
See NAMM’s press release for numbers and a slightly different angle. -Ed.

Meanwhile, many of the attendees were disappointed by the lack of representation from some of the bigger names in the industry. Gone are the days of an Ableton, once distributed by M-Audio, announcing new versions of Live on Saturday Morning; that company, like many others, reserves the honor exclusively for events like Anaheim’s Winter NAMM show. Indeed, M-Audio and their new parents Avid were easy to miss in the crowd, having a small display of product and scheduled Pro Tools demos hidden among the racks of Hal Leonard Publishing’s music books. The show that once sprawled across two floors of the Nashville Convention Center and the adjacent arena now fit almost entirely within the confines of the Center’s main exhibit hall. Even with Summer NAMM’s well-deserved reputation as a “guitar show,” the larger guitar manufacturers were conspicuous in their absence.

That being said, Nashville’s participation in the yearly NAMM schedule is an important one for other reasons. The influx of travelling convention participants is something the local economy counts on for tax dollars — now more than ever. The city’s other main convention center, Gaylord Opryland Hotel, is closed until November after sustaining heavy flood damage, causing the cancellation or relocation of many events previously booked for this summer. That leaves events like NAMM with the burden of bringing badly-needed revenue to the city. More strikingly, the show and its exhibitors are working with ongoing efforts to assist local musicians and studios in recovering their lost possessions and livelihoods in the wake of the floods.

Nashville electronic musician Tony Gerber [artist site @ reverbnation] is a direct recipient of such aid. Gerber is a solo artist, member of space music ensemble Spacecraft, and active in the music performance scene in Second Life as Cypress Rosewood. He’s had his music life put on hold after the flood, losing approximately 80% of his and his family’s possessions. Despite those losses, he sees the ordeal as a “positive experience,” largely due to the assistance of friends, fellow area musicians organizing a benefit concert in his behalf, and the Recording Academy-associated relief organization MusiCares.

While MusiCares provides aid to individuals in the music industry during many types of crises, they acted quickly to establish an active presence in Nashville’s music community, offering expedited financial aid to cover losses. They also partnered with retailer Guitar Center to collect equipment donations at their stores nationwide and to offer discounted prices on replacement gear to flood victims. While details are kept confidential, MusiCares staff member Courtney Bailey said that they had given out approximately $250,000 to flood victims since their establishment.

It wasn’t only individual studios to suffer losses: local cartage and equipment storage facility Soundcheck was inundated as well, with the accumulated wealth of over 600 musicians from the broad spectrum of Nashville’s music scene suffering loss and damage. Even some of the smaller exhibitors on the show floor had been touched by the destruction: Mark Payung of Glasstones [Facebook link] had kept some of his company’s prototype guitars at a locker at Soundcheck. “It was really a depressing site. It was so bad they had signs that said ‘Beware of Snakes.’ Going in and seeing all my gear destroyed was heartbreaking.”

Despite the flood and despite the economy, retailers and buyers still came to Summer NAMM 2010 to do business. It’s unclear at this point whether we’re experiencing a few bad years or a downward trend that could change the way the music manufacturing industry operates. We may be able to tell more from Winter NAMM, where manufacturers customarily pull out the big guns. Until then, Nashville restocks, refinishes, repairs, and rebuilds.

Contributor Jeremy Dickens is a native Nashvillian musician, engineer, sound designer and and producer with works on dPulse Recordings, Sony Digital and his own Discrepancy Recordings imprint.

Tony Youngblood (photos, additional reporting) resides in Nashville, TN and hosts the experimental improv music podcast Theatre Intangible. [twitter]

Nashville Flood Relief:
http://www.unitedwaynashville.org/nashvilleflood/

Music games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are simple enough in terms of gameplay, but testifying to the power of people’s passion for music, their impact has been staggering. At a time when purchasing recorded music has waned from a 90s peak, downloads for games are proving surprising growth, despite pundits predicting the segment would cool off. The talents of the Harmonix team attracted the collaboration of the download-averse surviving Beatles and family members. But most importantly, the popularity of these games has translated into renewed interest in learning to play real instruments. It’s no accident popular music chart sales are surging, or that you will now find a new selection of digital and acoustic (but serious) instruments at your local Best Buy, often located right next to the games section. (Even as a witness to this trend, I was surprised recently to pick up an extra KORG nanoKONTROL in the aisle next to Rock Band.) Heck, even sales of music notation software are growing.

I’m uncertain of the extent to which a game like Rock Band can be identified as the cause of these trends, but there’s no question that popular music making is on the rise, and games are part of the shift. Perhaps it’s a matter of games changing the way people feel about making music. After all, a lot of early music training is very much like a game: to learn a new instrument, you simplify the playing of that instrument into more basic exercises. Obviously, that helps develop chops, but it also boosts confidence, giving a music student a feel for what it’s like to play successfully. (And, let’s face it, even experienced pro players sometimes need to defeat anxiety.)

The dark side of all of this has been that the music itself has been limited to a narrow selection of top-of-the-charts hits and popular classic tracks. Rock Band Network doesn’t yet address the limited instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, voice), but it does open production to a new range of artists – and that, in turn, could be the beginning of much more to come. By allowing anyone to author and distribute tracks for a nominal subscription fee on Microsoft’s Xbox creation community, Rock Band Network is all about opening floodgates.

Having followed the story here on CDM since last year, I’m thrilled that the Rock Band Network store itself is now live. The results run the gamut from relatively big-name artists to more obscure contributions. (Phone giant T-Mobile will pony up some cash to highlight an “Artist of the Month” from the community, in the interest of shining a spotlight on lesser-known acts.) The only bad news is, while the store is international, the Rock Band Network isn’t immune from the music industry’s trouble crossing national borders; as our own Jaymis discovered to his dismay, countries like Australia are left out. I hope to talk to Harmonix and Microsoft about how they plan to make these kinds of efforts more global with time.

For those countries covered, though, you can now enjoy the store as both an artist and listener (or make that “player”). Starting on launch day last week, of Montreal, The Shins, The Hold Steady, Steven Vai, and geek God Jonathan Coulton were onboard. (“The Future Soon,” anyone?) I’m pleased that among other artists, we have Flight of the Conchords to look forward to.

But I will say, whether you appreciate these games or not, there are promising signs for the music business here, without question. Harmonix’s founders began work with experimental musical interface research, as with many of the readers of this site. Oddly enough, though, what they found was by some measure an entirely new industry.

By the numbers:

• Rock Band Network launches with over 100 songs, out of a private beta; expect far more.
• Artists choose pricing tiers and get a 30% royalty (high for this kind of royalty, at least for a typical indie artist).
• 1,100 tracks are currently available on Rock Band, prior to the many, many more expected on RBN.
• Some 4,300 users have registered on RBN to contribute tracks and/or perform peer review. That’s significant growth for Microsoft’s XNA community, and it’s prior to a wider launch that will be an order of magnitude bigger.

Harmonix info:
How to Submit a Song; scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to Become a Peer Reviewer (aka playtester)

I’ll see the Harmonix team this week at GDC; I’m looking forward to it. Let me know if you have questions for them. It is a reminder, though, of why I’m glad to spend my travel time in March at the Game Developer Conference even in place of South by Southwest. I think a lot of our future may be at the former as much as the latter. (Well, and if not, I still get to geek out with discussions of adaptive music engines.)

If this stuff does interest you, don’t miss our previous, exhaustive Q&A’s with Harmonix (thanks to the folks there for being so forthcoming):
Inside the Rock Band Network, as Harmonix Gives Interactive Music its Game-Changer
Your Band in Rock Band: Rock Band Network Beta Opens, Q&A with Harmonix

I’m a blogger. I’m supposed to be all about shiny, about scoops and exclusives, about fast-paced development. But even I’ve begun to wonder about the expectations some developers and users alike have about pace. And that doesn’t just apply to the vendors: it applies to writers and users, too.

One theme repeated again and again by developers around NAMM: let’s slow down. It’s not a new idea, but several recent developments make it doubly relevant.

Two hardware products revealed this week in functioning, working order had been separately accused of being vaporware, because they didn’t come out right away – perhaps an indication of the increasingly-compressed perception of time in technology. The Beat Kangz Beat Thang drum machine and Teenage Engineering OP-1 synth/sampler/instrument are now each nearing shipment. Now, I expressed some skepticism about each of these products, only because I tend to believe what ships — too many gorgeous prototypes have wound up unraveling along the difficult road to market. Yes, I even poked fun at the OP-1 for pushing my “awesomeness versus shippingness” continuum. But I’m not surprised that the gestation of these two tools has consumed some time. Frankly, it’s gotten to the point where I feel some relief when I hear about delays. Efficient design can mean faster development, so delays can be a bad thing. But if you really care about quality, sometimes you miss – or don’t set – deadlines.

On the software side, people are still talking about Ableton’s decision to freeze development to fix their software. It’d be a mistake to read too much into that: the 8.1 release of Live wasn’t up to their quality standards, and I’m convinced the underlying process will be improved so that future quality is better. But this goes beyond Ableton.

A correlation of this announcement is the realization that software doesn’t have to ship with bugs. Some tools in our industry simply ship too early. Beyond bugs, there are products that ship with important features missing, or incomplete realization of their ideas. There are products that should have gone through some revision that don’t. There are features that should be taken out and wind up getting left in. Some of this has to do with syncing up with distribution and marketing, but at least the rest of us can adjust our own expectations in regards to the parts of this process we do touch.

Gino Robair has a superb essay on this topic, spawned by the discussion here on CDM and what you readers have been saying:

Why Is This So Complicated? [Electronic Musician Robair Report Blog]

It’s worth reading his whole essay, which also responds to concerns that those of us in the press aren’t being fair and impartial in our reviews. But I want to highlight this passage, because it suggests that the industry can change:

Kirn notes that “all software has bugs.” Perhaps. But wouldn’t it be great if developers came clean and told us what the issues were when their products were released? Better still, wouldn’t it be a win-win situation if manufacturers didn’t make promises that they couldn’t keep about features, but only announced things that are fully functional, perhaps adding extra features in .x updates. Imagine if a developer announced and delivered a bulletproof version of their new audio app, then named five state-of-the-art features that would be added incrementally over the next few months in free updates to registered users (perhaps after they were bug-fixed using public betas).

In fact, as a certain developer noted, you shouldn’t even need a public beta to fix bugs. Adding features doesn’t have to mean adding bugs, because properly engineered, those features would work reliably from the start. Getting testers to find the bugs, or even producing those bugs in the first place, is a cost that should be avoided wherever possible. The goal of any engineering effort should be to stop bugs before they’re created, not test them after they’re created, or worst of all, ship them to customers. Prevention is the best medicine.

This sentence from Gino could be framed and hung on the wall of every software developer. (Actually, I say “developer,” when I should say “manager” – most developers are more than aware of this issue.)

Unfortunately, the industry is training an entire generation of users to wait for the first update before upgrading their apps.

That’s the crux of the problem: it’s one symptom of an epidemic of lowered expectations. Incidentally, when I said “all software has bugs,” I didn’t intend that as an excuse. (I actually got a couple of notes from prominent developers about that who passionately disagreed, partly because they have invested time to avoid just that!) Any software has the potential for failure under specific circumstances that may not be immediately discovered. In this case, though, the point of contention is really known bugs. And those don’t have to ship. Cosmetic issues often do ship, and that’s fine. But music software should be considered “mission-critical,” because to a musician, it is.

It’s known by different names, but most developers, regardless of industry, refer to certain issues as “known but shipping.” If that bug is something more serious, like a crash, it really isn’t okay.

By the way, if you think this is just about software, I think you’re mistaken. I’m biased toward the value of software, but I have to take issue with Gino Robair’s criticism of software’s disposability. I couldn’t agree more — on the software side, that is. I just happen to think it applies to hardware, too. As Gino notes:

Some announcements, however, just seem to pile sexy new features onto an older product while core issues remain unsolved.

Sounds to me like that applies to a lot of hardware electronics, too. And while traditional physical, acoustic instruments have extraordinary longevity – ask a 17th century viola da gamba – a lot of modern instruments, especially electronic ones, are designed to be as disposable as software upgrades. Also, at least a software update doesn’t impact the environment; electronic instruments produce toxins and consume energy in their construction, disposal, or both. (See Gino’s original editor’s note, which focuses on guitars. Gino would no doubt approve of the CDM readers still using their Commodore 64s.)

If we want this situation to change, all of us – not just vendors – will need to participate. All of us are to blame, not just developers. As users, we often ask for more – more features, more stuff – and we want it more quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily. But we should also reward developers when they focus on improving quality, and some of the things you can’t see. Because I know we users care about those things, we should be willing to wait for upgrades if that wait pays off in quality, future-proofing, and stability. It’s not wrong to ask for more, but we should be prepared to wait if we want that “more” to actually work. Needless to say, it’s also important for users to invest wisely in software that has value, as some of these pressures are financial.

As writers and publishers, we sometimes aggravate the problem, as well. If we’re reviewing a product in a non-shipping version, we should identify it as such. We can all take the opportunity to review products not just when they’re new, but when they’ve been out for a while. (In fact, readers, if any of you want to help me with some “long-term” reviews of software — tools you know even better because you’ve used them for months or years – I’ll be making that a goal.) We also often look at the presence or absence of features in a vacuum, because that boils down nicely to “Pros” and “Cons” categories. It’s always a challenge, but we can try to go beyond that one dimension.

I don’t want to speak for any writer or publisher other than myself, or criticize any outlet or writer other than myself: this is directed primarily at me, because I’m the one I can control. So I’ll just say this: I’m ready to commit to spending more time with tools. That’s the way I work in my music, so that’s the way I would prefer to write about things. I still believe in getting information out there quickly, because on the Web, you get corrections, clarifications, and new knowledge more quickly as a result. But it’s possible to do that, and spend time on really getting deeper in topics. I also believe it’s important to focus on more than just “news,” which is especially tough – but also especially valuable – on a daily online site. I’ll take that as a personal challenge to myself — it’s New Year’s Resolution season, anyway.

Speed can be a wonderful thing. When I’m teaching, I regularly encourage students to sketch code in a day. Deadlines can be liberating. A number of creations I saw at NAMM got prototypes wrapped up in the days leading to NAMM, so the trade show itself can encourage the forward progress of development.

But some things are important enough that they take time. Sometimes, engineering a solid foundation means being patient now in order to save time later.

I can say, I’m seeing encouraging signs that a lot of music tech vendors are ready to get off the treadmill. I heard repeated again and again “we took longer with this, because then we could do it right.” I can’t imagine anyone complaining about that in the long run.

The food world has slow food, a movement that encourages sustainability, quality, health, local tradition, diversity, and taste. It isn’t just about the food: it’s about how that food is consumed and appreciated by the eater (read: user). I think we need “slow development” in hardware and software. All of the same issues are at stake. Even labor and environmental standards are issues, because music gear and computers, like agriculture, are now globalized and mass-produced.

Nor does this have to apply exclusively to the vendors at NAMM. All of us have projects, technological and musical, that could benefit from our own patience. It could be your new hardware controller, or your new album. The Internet age can be intimidating, as we see people making incredible progress and showing them off in just-uploaded YouTube videos. But each of us has a pace that’s appropriate for each process. Making things and making music should be an enjoyable process. If we’re slower than someone else because we’re learning, because we want to take extra time to work out the details that matter to us, we can savor that. We can give ourselves the time we deserve. That’s likely the first step to being patient with everyone else.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to us. It really is possible to derive new value from slowing down.

Designing Sound, as the name implies, focuses entirely on the craft of audio from film to games. While there are industry-driven sites devoted to the topic, this blog is entirely the labor of love of composer and sound designer Miguel Isaza, whose writing has also appeared on Spain’s Hispasonic and Monofónicos. (Miguel also tweets to Reaktor aficionados as reaktorlovers.) That personal perspective has imbued the site with the feeling of artists talking to artists.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

All week, Designing Sound has focused on Rob Bridgett, who has worked on numerous sound designs for games. Despite the massive growth of the game industry, most top artists have worked largely in obscurity – even less so in sound. There isn’t an equivalent of Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Walter Murch, or others. (Those greats have been featured in Designing Sound specials, too.) Gaming is a young industry, to be sure, but that’s no excuse for simple ignorance.

In this week’s interviews with Isaza, Bridgett talks frankly about every last detail of what goes into sound production. He’s frank not only about what can go right in a game production – Scarface, pictured above, gets special treatment – but also what can go wrong. The brutal deadlines, fluid production parameters, and tangled production process of games can exact a toll on sound in gaming. The high point of this: Bridgett has gotten to employ the full resources of Skywalker Sound and has been at the forefront of bringing Hollywood-style sonic treatment to gaming.

I’m sure many readers here are curious about the games industry. There’s still time to forward your own questions to Miguel to pass along to Rob Bridgett.

Exclusive interview

Rob Bridgett Special

Ask your own questions

Incidentally, this is beyond what we even imagined for our fledgling noisepages.com, which we’re readying for a full launch as a community and blogging platform. Miguel created Designing Sound without prompting or assistance – it’s entirely his vision. It’s great to have people sharing information in this way. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are simply ensuring the parties involved find some way to make the adjustment.

And music distribution is becoming wonderfully weird and diverse – maybe far more so than in recording’s so-called golden age, an era in the past dominated by racial division, predatory labels, and a few dominant big businesses. (Money is tough as always, but it does make you wonder why we complain so.)

One sign of the shifting landscape: online streaming site Pandora is now actually calling for more performance fees — for terrestrial (AM/FM) radio, anyway. Ars Technica has been doing a great job of following the issue:

Pandora now pushing radio to pay for music, too

It seems Pandora – along with other webcasters – was able to cut a deal on webcasting rates, in a battle that put music listeners and makers at the center of a legislative struggle. Legislators had been the ones to intervene and save webcasting, under pressure from listener constituents and even musicians. Pandora founder Tim Westergren told CDM how dire a failure on these rates could be.

What the deal means is that we can return to the rosier vision of how online streaming could help promote indie musicians, something Westergren put eloquently in a 2007 interview with CDM. But looking back at Tim’s arguments from two years ago, a central tenant was fairness — meaning big, corporate radio broadcasters really ought to face a level playing field and start paying musical rights owners. (Public radio in the US, by contrast, is likely to benefit from the online deal, as public stations increasingly rely upon wider online distribution and even pledges from loyal online listeners. Moved from Omaha to Montreal? You can still listen to your favorite station.)

There are signs that not only have online music pirates moved to download stores like iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon, but to streaming solutions, as well. In one of a number of recent studies, for instance, the UK is showing online file sharing down markedly as legal streaming grows. To me, the most interesting thing about this is that it disproves a long-held industry assumption that habits, once set, wouldn’t change. For better or worse, the online world doesn’t seem to work that way.

Meanwhile, the lines between “indie” and “major” are blurring quickly. Again, Ars Technica:

Universal/TuneCore deal opens major doors for indie artists

The surprise there is that it’s not so much about distributing Universal artists exclusively – online artist services firm TuneCore is now opening its membership base to Universal and visa versa, so that Universal can discover new artists and artists get licensing and mastering services from UMG without the need for exclusive contracts with the major label. In fact, if there’s one word that sums up the future of music deals, “non-exclusivity” seems to be it.

(clarification) As kj notes in comments, I think saying this opens “major doors” is a bit of a stretch. It opens a small door at a major. But on the other hand, the idea of a label becoming an open service shop for artists – for offering, say, mastering for a fee as part of their revenue – is new and, provided it actually works, interesting. And it’s clearly part of a larger trend.

But I think the best news is the spread of unusual means of musical distribution. Eliot Van Buskirk writes a round-up of favorites for Wired Magazine. (And yes, while top ten lists are overused, they’re brilliantly appropriate when you actually have ten really awesome things.)

10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music

From soup cans to music boxes to iPhone apps, there are a few underlying trends in there. One is experimentation in the delivery mechanism itself (including 8-tracks and cassettes, really). The other is in what you can do with the media, as with the interactive remixable iTunes album, or even art books that extend what an album actually is.

As these spread, though, I have to optimistically think that this is more than desperation or brief novelty. Distribution media haven’t just shifted from one popular form to another; they’ve imploded. We’re rapidly approaching a “minority majority” situation in which no one format dominates the others. We haven’t gone from the compact cassette to the CD to the MP3. We’ve gone from the CD to MP3s, MP4s, lossless files for aficionados and lossy streams for kids who love on-demand, vintage formats, physical media and art books and software. Instead of being strange anomalies, these other formats may actually be the new normal. I think in a way the business model doesn’t matter, because, let’s face it, a lot of art making is about losing money. What drives artists is loving sharing the thing they’re making, and finding someone who wants to love it, too. Some people will make a great business model around that, while others won’t.

But if you’re a music lover, we could be facing a new golden age. And if you missed compact cassettes, good news – they’re back.