Pro Sound Blog

For those who sing in the shower this mic/sponge may be a good idea.

One of my favorite rock and roll bands of all time is FILTER. They don’t have many albums out unfortunately and their last release was in 2002. The sonic quality of their albums is freakin’ amazing. From a mere audio engineering standpoint their albums Amalgamut and Title Of Record are as good as anything I’ve ever heard.

New Album

FILTER is back together now, after about 6 years off. I’ve picked up the new album called Anthems For The Damned. It isn’t quite as heavy as their previous stuff but I’m reserving my opinion until I’ve had a few listens.

This post is nine days late, but I’d like to tip my hat and a glass of wine back to Richard Wright. Richard Wright, keyboard player and founder of Pink Floyd, died from cancer at 65.

Pink Floyd is one of the all time greatest bands in the history of rock & roll and produced, IMO, the best album in rock history in Dark Side Of The Moon. Wright co-wrote five of the songs on Dark Side Of The Moon, which was in the billboard top 200 for 14 years. Man I’d love to be collecting those royalty checks.

Cheers to you Richard. Many thanks for the enjoyment I’ve gotten from your music over the years.

A couple of posts back I wrote about the mouth breathing fiber eating drummer who shits all the time. He was to come in last week and “spend 30 minutes on a few tweaks” on the first song. He came and was very nice, offering me a king sized snickers bar (I don’t eat candy) and a starbucks vanilla frappuccino (I definitely do those). Nice gesture.

Problem

He was to come and sit in on the mix for 30 minutes to do a few tweaks. That 30 minutes ended up being over 4.5 hours. It never ends. Once again I pay in the ass for my big mistake of taking a flat fee. I don’t think I can forgive myself for that huge blunder. I never would have done that back in my full time engineering days.

This “project” I’m working on is a comedy of errors. The keyboard player has really gotten under my skin. There’s a guy like him in most bands. He’s the one who is very agreeable yet a total lazy flake. He fakes his way through everything and puts out a half assed effort.

His assignment was to have his parts recorded and bounced down and ready to submit so we can start mixing the next songs. He supposedly worked for over a month on these tracks. I get a flash drive with his audio files on it which only contains the aliases (shortcuts for windows). He never copied the actual files to the drive, just an icon which points to the files resident on his hard drive.

Naturally he didn’t notice that these audio files, which would take several if not dozens of minutes to copy, copied in a split second. He also didn’t bother to check the drive and see if the files were there. Or did he simply click the alias which opened his internal hard drive and he didn’t know it?

Problem

Ok, so no big deal. Just get the files off his main hard drive which the aliases are referring to…right? Uh, of course not. The problem now is that the files those aliases pointed to are probably in a pawn shop somewhere, as his laptop was stolen. Yes, this guy worked for a whole month on something and didn’t back it up.

I’d laugh at this guy because he put a whole month into something and because of his own stupidity and half-assed way of doing things, he has to work another month. But I’m not laughing because it effects me. This means another fucking month of waiting around for him to get his shit done. Another month of my time. Another month of dealing with this project which should have been done months ago.

I’m tempted to pull the plug and just eject on these unprofessional boneheads.

This has been a very rough summer. In fact, this summer has changed me. I’m one grouchy mother fucker now and I’ve never been like that in my entire life. I don’t like being this way. The other day I almost assaulted my landlord. I got in a “heated” discussion with him about broken shit that has been bugging me and told him I was leaving. My grouchy attitude forced me to move which sucks, even though my new place is way better.

This summer I took on a project and made some very stupid and negligent choices in doing so. The main one being that I settled on a flat rate. Big mistake. Little did I know that this project would be several months long and that I’d be in the absolute hell of listening to a horrid vocalist who is so sharp he makes Ginsu carving knives look dull. Seriously. This guy sings entire freakin’ songs sharp and he doesn’t even know it. “Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp.” Working with this guy is like biting into rotten lemons all day. Then after spending hours on sharp vocals and doing hundreds (I mean hundreds) of takes per song, I have to go in with a pitch correcting software and fix every goddamn note. What a waste of my time, spending dozens of hours fixing some hack’s vocal tracks rather than spending time with my kids, my woman, golfing or just picking the lint out of my ass.

I can barely look these guys in the eye now for blowing my whole fucking summer and wasting my time. Damn the freakin’ keyboard player is so clueless I can’t begin to write about it. After being told his tracks would be all pre-done and ready to lay down I find out they’re not. Then, rather than doing so on his own, says he’d rather have me there to lay them down. No thought about my time, my gas or whatever. I drew the line there and said now way. It would have taken days and days to do that work he was supposed to have done previously.

That flat rate is looking pretty f’n small now since it has been spread out over months and months and months. Did I mention I had to drive 45 minutes each way for 2 months just to go listen to out of tune vocals? Bonus. Good thing gas hit $4.00/gallon right when I started this project. Perfect timing. Might as well take that flat fee and pour it down the fucking gas tank and dump what’s left into auto maintenance and repairs…

My personal life and other business ventures have suffered severely as a result of doing this gig and I’m just plain irritable as hell.

Bran for breakfast?

Now, thank God, we’re mixing. The problem is that we’re doing it at my personal residence. Now the drummer needs to come in and tell me to make his playing and his kit sound like someone other than his own. This guy is a fiber nut and eats about 1704% of his daily allowance of fiber. So he has to take a shit every 24 seconds. Freakin’ wonderful. I’ve got to go to coscto now and buy 120 rolls of toilet paper just because this bran/shit addict is invading my private space. And I wonder. How is shitting 63 times a day enjoyable?

I’m done dealing with musicians. I really mean it. I used to like engineering but I don’t anymore. It isn’t fun. It is grueling, monotonous, frustrating and insanely infuriating when dealing with amateurs. My ears have started ringing too and that has me worried.

After a couple of shots at the bar at that hell gig, and listening to more horrid 80’s metal sung by a singer who couldn’t hit a note if he threw a hand grenade into a piano, we convinced the club manager to release us from playing. So I went home.

This marks the 2nd time I’ve shown up at this club and loaded my gear in but didn’t play a lick. Click here to read about the first time. Note to self: don’t load gear into this venue until you’re sure you’re going to play.

Not all was lost at this gig though. The club gave me a pair of Jägermeister flip flops. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Blogging live at the gig with my iphone

Oh my god the opening band started with a Motley Crue song and now they’re playing Sweet Child of Mine by Guns and Roses. OMFG they’re playing Jackyl now.

Kill me

Oh now I find out we have no bass player. We’re going to try and get out of this gig and see if the 3rd band will just play longer. I’d rather go home and eat rice crispy treats anyway.

I’m doing a benefit gig tonight. The beneficiary is this local kid who was injured when an illegal bomb his neighbor was building exploded. Nice.

I hope we can raise some bucks to help this kid with his medical bills.

Man have you listened to today’s hip hop and top 40? Every damn artist has that “robotic Cher Autotune” sound. Good news, there’s a new version of Autotune.

With even more features like graphic representation of the notes (like Melodyne), vocalists who suck can now suck less.

Soon somebody will come out with a plugin which not only tunes the vocals, it writes the lyrics and performs them. Then the need for a vocalist will be eliminated. Since everyone lipsyncs these days anyway, they could just find the best looking “dancer” they can and stick them on stage to fake their parts.