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Monday, 10 November 2008 13:42 |
 By John McGlasson - GJD Contributor
In part three of this four-part series, we’ll look at album manufacturing.
When I first signed a bunch of artists, I planned a single release date for almost all of them. I’d recently had an investor put up the cash I’d need, so, assuming things would be the way they’d always been in the music biz up to that point, I decided to press a lot of each title so I could get a cheaper price per CD, under the (previously) safe assumption that I wasn’t pressing more than I could sell over a year or two. Then the physical retail end of the CD business tanked.
Now I have thousands of CDs I’m not likely ever to sell, and thousands more stuck in the retail distribution trap that I may or may not ever be paid for. Yes, I got them for .84 each, but that means nothing when I have a mountain of them taking up my storeroom and in warehouse limbo across the US, which can be returned to our former distributor anytime and subtracted from what they owe us. I’d be better off having pressed half as many at the normal rate of around $1.45e for a jewel case with 2-panel insert and having sold out, or nearly sold out of them.
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Monday, 20 October 2008 21:56 |
 By Theo Hartman - GJD Contributor
Read Part 1 here
One of the early compressors, the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer, had no external user controls (unless you count screwdriver access to one of the two internal trim pots). It was originally designed for “set-it-and-forget-it” use. The two variables that could be set internally were output volume and the amount of compression.
An early Orange Squeezer.
At first blush, moving these controls to the exterior would seem an obvious and straightforward way to modernize or improve the utility of the pedal. In the case of the volume control (the silver/brown circle standing on two legs in the foreground of photo above) it is indeed straightforward. The early Squeezers I’ve examined used linear taper trim pots for the internal volume setting. This makes sense—sort of. All volume settings are available (via screwdriver), and with no need to establish a correspondence between the physical position of the internal trim pot and the apparent loudness, the original designers could get by with linear taper just fine. Physical space issues aside for the moment, moving this control to the outside of the pedal requires little more than replacing the internal linear volume trimmer with an external log-taper potentiometer. You can reach the volume now, and when you turn it, what you hear makes sense.
The other trim pot inside the Squeezer (hiding behind the big gray capacitor with the blue line on it in the photo above), the compression setting, is a different story. Forget about taper. Fully half of this trim pot’s range results in silence (no output) from the unit. Putting this on the outside of the pedal would produce a device that could be unintentionally disabled by a user who thinks it’s safe to casually browse various settings of its knobs. Or worse, the knob gets bumped by accident and the unit goes silent: this is a sure way to send somebody looking for a dead battery, faulty cable or loose connection when in fact it’s an inappropriate range of control that’s the culprit.
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Friday, 17 October 2008 20:47 |
 Greg Howard - GJD Contributor
GJD: Last time you spoke about different ways to string a “Gibson-style” guitar (3 per side). What about a “Fender-type” guitars (6 per side) ?
GREG H: First off, I’ve never really liked string trees. I don’t like strings getting hung up. I love Kluson tuners. On the wound E, A, & D strings. I’ll do it with one wind. On the G-string, I’ll use two or three winds and on the B and high E string, I’ll wind all the way down to the post and not use the string tree. Then once I have the strings on, I’ll leave some slack. Then I’ll stretch the heck out of them with both hands going up and down the neck.
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Wednesday, 08 October 2008 21:33 |
By John McGlasson - GJD
Click here to read Part 1
In part two of this four-part series, we’ll look at album production, the misconceptions, and the truths, as I see them.
Album production is no place to cut corners, but you don’t have to pay a famous studio and producer to make an amazing album, you just need to share philosophy and work ethic with your producer and band, and there are two schools of though in this arena; authentic vs. artificial.
If, after reading this article, you disagree with my points, then any digital studio will do, and you’ll be using simulators, samples, plug-ins, pitch-correction, and cut-and-paste techniques to create an artificial product that’ll then sound artificial. If you find a producer that shares my, and hopefully your, philosophy about keeping the authentic signal chain in the recording process, you’ll have a much better sounding, better feeling album that you’re proud of years from now, and that your public will love.
There are plenty of what would be considered low-budget albums that shine above the expensively-produced competition decades later, so it’s not necessary to spend heavily, but modern recording techniques are bringing a sterility to recorded music that you must break away from if you want to set yourself apart. I’ve known several pro musicians who’ve paid the people they were told they needed to pay to have a great album, but they hate the results, and they don’t understand why.
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Monday, 06 October 2008 19:35 |
By Theo Hartman - GJD Contributor
The first two installments of this column discussed examples of how pedal tone can influence—and be influenced by—electronic and acoustic factors upstream and downstream of the pedal itself. A third and possibly more subjective criteria in pedal design is us--people, guitar players—and how we expect our gear to operate.
A good point of departure to explore matters more technical is to examine examples of how we set up circuits to be “user-friendly” (or not). I refer to this part of design as “control logic”. Do dials and switches work as you expect them to? Is their range of operation musically useful? Redundant? Overkill? Showstopping?
One of the simplest and most prevalent user controls on any pedal is the Volume control. There are numerous ways to implement a volume control, but one of the most common (passive) designs is as follows:
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Wednesday, 24 September 2008 18:03 |
The excitement that an artist or band feels when signing with a label and having any kind of team and support behind them, big or small, can quickly be crushed by the realities of both the old and new music business.
Artists willingly sign these contracts that usually state that the label is going to be repaid in full for the production, manufacturing, distribution, and promotion of the album before the artist gets a dime, but artists always seem surprised when they don’t see any money.
I don’t think that most bands that are unsigned know what happens once you sign with a label, and bands that are or have been signed by labels don’t seem too willing to talk about what happened to them, because at some point they have to acknowledge that they read and signed the contract willingly through starry eyes, and are embarrassed by the outcome. Local bands and the local press tend to make a very big deal about being “signed”, and the public perception is that a limo pulled up and carried away their hometown heroes to fame and fortune, and bands are embarrassed to let the public know the truth, so there’s always been a rosier scenario carried on than reality allows, and nobody wants to talk about it.
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Thursday, 18 September 2008 18:37 |
 GJD: John, let’s go back to pots for a minute. What about the taper of a pot; are they all pretty much the same?
JS: No actually they are all quite different. You can order different tapered pots. They run 10%, 20%, etc.
GJD: What does that percentage mean?
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Monday, 15 September 2008 21:31 |
By John McGlasson - GJD Contributor
The Circle of Events
In my last article, I mentioned the circle of events that must take place for ad-supported, free-to-the-listener internet radio to survive, being; Customer listens to music, views the ads on the side of the page, clicks thru and buys the product, but I want to expand on that in this article.
My question is, how does the advertiser, and an online station like my favorite example of free internet radio, Pandora, gauge success when the advertising done with Pandora is often part of much broader national, or even global marketing plans for beer, liquor, cell phones and service, cars, and other products that don’t have “click-thru purchase” response to ads, which are very easy to track?
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Wednesday, 10 September 2008 22:13 |
 GJD: What are some of the challenges in terms of buying parts for an amp builder?
BM: Well, let me give you an example. I just bought a batch of caps and used them in one of my client's new amps. After I finished building it, the amp just didn't sound right. I was scratching my head and could not figure out what was wrong. Then it dawned on me. Maybe it's those new caps. Sure enough, I swapped them out and the amp sounded great. As I mentioned earlier, that kind of stuff can make you crazy. I try to make mental notes of what caps sound good with each specific application. In other words, a cap that doesn't sound good in one amp might be perfect for another.
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