Blog is moving 08/05/2010
 
I'm experimenting with WordPress.com at mikaelsuomela.wordpress.com
 
 
I don't get it. I mean digital contents.

I bought a Kindle. The device is a pleasure in itself, easy on the eyes in many ways. The speed by which the books are delivered is also nice, because it's instant.

The thing is that the books are copy-protected (if bought from Amazon, O'Reilly and Pragmatic Bookshelf are DRM-free). I might have a right to transfer the DRM'd contents to a new Kindle, but that's up to Amazon. As far as I know I can't transfer my e-books to an iPad or to another device. And that is simply not right.

I have bought those books, paid full price. It should be my decision on which gadget I read them on.

Copy protection has an obvious consequence: the value of my device goes up - because I'm locked to the device. I really don't like the idea of my device going up in value. Think about it: let's say that your iPod had 3000 copy-protected songs. If you paid full price for that your device would be worth 3000€, should you be not able to transfer those songs to another player. Who would want to carry around 3000€? I mean really? But hey… Of course you can transfer the stuff, because you can play mp3's on any mp3 player in the world. 


What if the device would be stolen? What if the device would break up? Where is my library then?

Your library is yours. I want my book library to be mine. I don't want to "license" content. The copy of the book is mine. DRM is simply fucked up, as it makes value where there should be none.

At least the DRM should be so that the license is mine and I should be able to use the stuff on any device, regardless of the manufacturer and I should be able to make backups of the stuff. I should also be able to change the device at will.

That's one of the reasons I'm digging Spotify. I can have access on my mobile, my computers, my whatever. The license is for me, not the platform. The makers of the music are compensated somewhat, I don't know if fairly but still.
 
 

The short version of this is: the book is great, provocative and you should read and contemplate it, a lot. To say it in a bit longer way: Lessig talks about copyright against the backdrop of sharing (non-monetary) and commercial (monetary) economies. Lessig proposes that copyright should be taken into a new inquiry, because the present copyright law (in USA, at least) makes almost everyone a criminal if they use digital works and make working copies of them – let alone share them on peer-to-peer networks.

Copyright is not something that should be taken lightly. Most of my peers get a part or all of their living from the royalties and license payments mandated by copyright legislation. However, as Lessig says, when copyright is being used to silence critics and to stifle free speech, we are going to a control society of unforeseen proportions. This is clearly not desirable. The other undesirable thing is that if components of your work contain copyrighted intellectual property you must clear it all against copyright holders, many of whom are nowhere to be found – this is clearly a more of a problem in visual arts such as cinemas and photography.

Lessig suggests that copyright should be developed so that copyright would control commercial ventures and not that much non-monetary uses of copyrighted works. If a derivative work is free for everyone to use it should not lessen the value of the original work – more attention is more value. Piracy – selling your work without your permission is however a wrong, because that is money taken from you involuntarily. Sharing is not stealing if the original copy if left intact and instantly reproducible. Patents and such will still be enforced to the max under this line of thinking, because no-one will do large scale stuff without monetary compensation in the physical world.

Where does this leave us, the musicians?

Well, I see a lot of places where the present copyright law is undesirable. Let’s say that I’d like to put up my transcription of your song for no monetary compensation whatsoever. Under the present law this is not authorized. So no transcription of your song, even if you’d actually like it. This is clearly a hindrance on music education and artist appreciation! There’s no better way to appreciate great works of music than trying to understand, transcribe and play them for yourself. It also produces true understanding of the difficulties artists face in trying to learn their craft! So as far as education goes the remix and the transcription (and yes, I’m talking about the millions of Guitar Pro files out there) are really vehicles for cultural transference. This is how we do culture, by standing on the shoulders of giants. I really don’t want put up “in the style of” exercises if the real thing is available.

Finland does not have the abomination of sellable copyrights, here the creator always retains what we call moral rights to his works. This fact has not however been a great protection for the Finnish musician, there has always been someone else taking his cut before the artist. So if an artist wants to put up his works for free copying this should be his right – again we are thinking here of sowing your seeds to the wind and community formation, fandom. This does not mean that for-profit organizations should be allowed to disseminate the work for free (such as radio broadcasting). If you share it for free without a monetary (even ad or other 3rd party pays -type) gain that should be ok. For-profits need to still remunerate!

 
 
I've made a wiki for my pupils at http://oppi.mikaelsuomela.com. The site is in Finnish.
 
 
 
 

I have a tiny company that puts out music, called Expletio Productions. On the site there’s the Caipirinha track The Rhythm and new stuff from me as I make it.

I use Soundcloud for demo purposes, as a way of doing alpha/beta testing. I really, really do appreciate all comments either on Expletio site, on Soundcloud or at this site.

Soundcloud makes sharing of stuff easy. Many of my pupils use Mikseri to put out their music and for similar purposes.

I recommend all musician friends of mine to read Steve Lawson’s writing about Bandcamp and Soundcloud. I use both.

 
 
My last post was about the lack of nuance in new recordings. As a counter-example on how to please the ears: The Beatles 2009 Remasters is a box of superb sounding cd's, recordings done just right . The sound is open, there is bass, the dynamics are still there even though the records play louder than the previous masterings from the 80's. They have not manipulated the original tapes so there is no loss in the sound quality from excessive digital sound processing trickery. What you are left with is an awe-inducing grand view into the superb musicianship of what was The Beatles.

Have a listen to the song Here Comes The Sun from the album Abbey Road. It starts out with a simple acoustic guitar on the left channel and slowly evolves into a tiny pop masterpiece. The voice arrangement and slight twists to very basic chord structures keep the song interesting throughout but still compact and poppy. The sound on the remaster is very even, you can hear the clear and punchy bassline. It might not be the most inspired Beatles song ever, but it's a testimony to their utmost professionalism in playing and arranging. As such it's also a testament to the solid engineering of their team in the 60's and this year's restoration work. Now everything can be heard in a beautiful balance. Their achievements are even greater when one realizes that at the 60's there were no computer aided touch-up tools, you had to play well, record carefully and get it right. The singing is stunningly good. The way those guys play really solid rhythm is simple but hard-grooving. There are lots of 60's records which would not hold up to this sort of scrutiny.

In the end there's only so much a sound engineer can do. The music itself has to be composed, arranged and played so the results are pleasing. If you do heavy metal with drum machines, you get heavy metal done with drum machines. It works if it's the end result you are seeking, but it takes away from the humanity of the playing. Even heavy metal used to be about humans playing together and interacting - with ebbs and flows, human-sized dynamics. No one yet does human playing as good as a human - machines are too perfect, too uniform, too machine-y… As we seek perfection we might think that all the little blemishes need to be stripped out but the end result is the musical equivalent of computer rendered landscape picture: it looks fine but is lifeless…

As the technology gets better, the sharpness of the tools gets more life-like results and I do understand the costs of using real musicians. So for the music industry that's seeking maximum profits (or any profits at all) in a world where you have the make your killing quick, the digital workstation is the standard. We all do touch-ups, we all edit, we make the music in the program. When you hear a new record, you hear Pro Tools or Logic - it's inescapable. The better the musicians are, the merrier the Pro Tools operator is. The need to touch-up goes down, but you still do edit heavily. It makes it faster to put out the product. What makes it a bit weird is that all those programs have lots of tools to increase the dynamics (Imogen Heap uses those to the full extent). It's just that the goal in today's music business is maximum loudness when listened to on the iPod, on the radio or in the car - full stun if you please… Music is being used to battle all sorts of noises and in the process becomes noise itself, just more pleasant. So dynamics are being decreased, all the time.

Chickenfoot's new record is a testimony to a hard rocking group playing without a click (a track that has a drum machine or equivalent to give musicians exact machine rhythm while playing) and thus they have a more dynamic sound. It breathes only because of the playing, the recording itself is loud to the hilt. Rock was always about being loud (remember Spinal Tap?). Loud doesn't have to mean being constantly super loud, rock can also be forceful but with dynamics. As there can be no light without the dark, so music needs softer passages to be fully breathtaking on the loudest passages.

There are some people who can do amazing things with machines, like Imogen Heap. I can't begin to fathom how she does that. It must be time-consuming to the extreme to do those intricate arrangements that Imogen's music rests upon. But to have good rock going on with machines? Nine Inch Nails were great with their limitations even if the NIN recordings are stupendously constantly loud. I'm fascinated by the machines and every day somebody does something interesting with them. I really want to learn  to use that machine palette to the maximum. So no, I'm not against digital workstations at all. I effing love Logic. I love plugins, because I don't have money to buy the best outboard gear. I love the extreme clarity of digital recording, I don't have nostalgia for tape. Digital recordings can be stunningly full of life while being really extremely clear: check out Lyle Lovett's Joshua Judges Ruth. Digital workstations are tools, it's the meanings in music that is the thing - the goals we seek.

This writing assumes that the music is done as an end in itself - that the value of music is the music itself and the reward of music is listening to it with full focus. Technobrega and other such things are interesting, but I can't imagine myself to listen at home to techno and focus on the intricacies of such sound - recordings made to saturate your senses with noise while dancing. I'm becoming aware that you never can do a recording which would top an excellent live performance in an acoustically fine space, especially when we are talking about acoustic music. Rock too is better live when you get a good club such as Tavastia in Helsinki and an excellent band on stage. Arenas or stadiums don't sound that good to me…

Thanks for John Liljelund for reading and commenting the first draft.
 
 
I just had my listening space at work renovated and somebody loaned me a pair of nice active speakers (Adam A7). Enthusiastically I started to listen through my collection of music, in different file formats (FLAC, mp3, streams from Spotify and Soundcloud). I made a few pretty obvious observations: the better the technical quality of recording (the best being 24bit/96Khz FLAC), the deeper the enjoyment and that streams are pretty ok, but in critical listening conditions they sound really flat (as if nuances and colors are missing). 


Of usual CD quality stuff Imogen Heap's Speak For Yourself (2005) was a stunning 3-dimensional experience - and it was the one of the few new records to sound good! Almost all the best recordings were from the 80's! What the hell is going on? All the new music somehow seems to sound really stuffed and screechy when listened in good listening conditions. Yes, I'm talking about the loudness wars. But loud is not the whole story. Bass frequencies need lots of energy to be heard - so they are the first to go on modern recordings as having lots of bass makes the music on recording relatively quieter (you can't make the music just louder on recordings as it starts to distort - at first it's subtle but as soon as you push it it becomes just unlistenable). But I miss the bass! Dio's Holy Diver was one of the only heavy rock recordings to have really nice bass, and it's from 1983! Dire Straits' Money For Nothing still seems to be the pinnacle of exquisite pop recording, and it's from 1986! WTF? Music produced by Trevor Horn sounded great (Seal) from the 90's. Music from 2000 and onwards? Screechy, loud and bass is missing. And I hate it!


Music should be listened to with proper equipment, not with laptop computers or shitty earbuds. Ghetto blasters were great! Even cheap home stereo's are great! Of course, with really great equipment like Adam Speakers or better, you get a totally emotionally satisfying and moving-you-to-tears experience and you crave it loud - it's like the best high you can get!


So demand more from your equipment and your music. Buy some good speakers! Imogen Heap's record was a rare glimmer of good things in these days. I just hope that FLAC makes more inroads to homes. At the moment it still means that you have to rip your cd's to FLAC format, but there are some independent stores offering FLAC. Nine Inch Nails had free FLAC downloads on their site. Maybe there's hope also in the fact that European Broadcasting Union uses FLAC as its transfer format.


Songbird is a great program that plays FLAC on Mac, Windows and Linux. 


The other hope is for streaming services to have good high definition streams. I know that it takes a really fat internet connection for proper HD stream, but what if you got one? I'd really love for Spotify or Soundcloud to provide streams better than 320Kbps.
 
Summer begins 06/02/2009
 

Summer. Great. So now all those little things that were on the backburner during the busy winter season should commence anew. Hmm.

Let's see. I've been thinking about combining private lessons with some sort of group study and maybe even some sort of online thingy. I've installed Moodle on some websites, so a learning environment could be put up. I'd like to get some opinions though. Group lessons could be about some specific topics and/or matinees where we could play and perform together.

I'm having some ideas (not necessarily mine) about how to enhance the learning process with my pupils. I'm wishing to incorporate their goals (=the music they want to play) into some sort of framework. I really am not interested in trying to teach stuff that the pupil finds uninteresting - I might try to market something that is worthy by my reckoning, but I'll leave it at that. But a systematical approach whereby my students could become more self-sustaining on guitar-study would be great... Of course the Finnish music school education plan has a grading system and a course syllabus. I try to devise a way for the pupils to navigate through that...

 
 

New looks, a new language and less clutter. That's the thing with this upheaval of mine. I don't promise to blog more often, but I try to keep it interesting and on-topic on music making, guitar playing and studying guitar.

I've blogged from 2000 in finnish language, now I'll experiment with english. I do hope that whoever reads this forgives the occasional lapse in writing and grammar - I'm not a native english speaker.

The main thing of course is playing...