Category Archives: Odd Stuff

In the studio with Kingsblood

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This February I had the opportunity to spend some time in an aspect of the music industry that I’ve never experienced. One of the bands that I’ve seen (and shot) a few times, Kingsblood, announced that they would be spending some time in a local recording studio, and I asked if it would be OK for me to hang out with them (full set of pictures).

I really had no idea what to expect, and fortunately the sound engineer, Rob, was very easy to get along with, telling me where I could go (pretty much anywhere) and when (not in the same room as microphones while they were recording). This seemed like a “duh” point to me, but he confirmed that many people just don’t seem to get that point.

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I was darn near mesmerized by the sound board–the rows of buttons, knobs, and lights had me wishing I could just hang out with Rob to learn some small part of his craft. Alas, the only knob I learned (through observation, since I didn’t want to interrupt Rob’s work) was the monitor volume so that non-performers could hear what was going on.

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The first session was dedicated to recording drums and bass. I spent a bit of time hanging out with the guys, mostly observing, trying to stay out of the way, and quickly learned that this was a very cool and important experience for them too. There was almost always someone taking pictures or video with their phone. The meta bug bit me hard.

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As I sized up the studio, I had realized that I would have a very difficult situation on my hands, photographically. The drummer would be recording in a room that I couldn’t be in, separated by glass, that would drive me completely crazy if I tried to use flash through the glass. Instead, I set up a single light stand to one side of the room, out of view. With a wireless flash in the room, I could then capture images that would include both the drummer, and the rest of the crew.

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I departed before the bass player did his recording (they evidently didn’t finish until 4AM) but I did spend some time watching him restring his bass.

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Session two consisted of recording the guitar players, and at first I didn’t quite get the setup. The musician was sitting in the same room as everyone else, plugged into their pedals, then with something transmitting the signal to an isolation booth, where the amps pumped out the sound where mics were arrayed to pick it all up.

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So that made for some great photos because I could be right with the musicians, and watch them hamming it up with everybody.

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Of course, the meta moments continued.

This seemed like an ideal way to do the recording–performing among the rest of the band, a mini audience jamming to your performance. Not exactly like a real show, but definitely more inclusive feeling than drums or vocals.

Photographically, this was the easiest day of all. Despite being dark, I could set up a pair of light stands in one corner of the studio: I bounced one flash into a neutral color wall, and the other went directly into the room. That helped me get decent light on faces, as well as filling in the rest of the room with a gentle glow.

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The third session was reserved for vocals.
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Photographically, it was almost impossible to get decent shots–the isolation booth has a glass door, but the singer was standing behind a large shield, designed, I assume to prevent echos bouncing back to the microphone.

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They let me step into the booth during ‘scratch’ recording, which, best as I can tell, was a kind of rough draft to eliminated later by better quality recordings.

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From my limited time with the band, this was the most stressful time of recording. I think they were all getting a little studio fatigue, and were still working out the kinks of new song lyrics. Alex, the lead vocalist, spent 40 minutes on the first line alone. There were many times that he heard something in a recording that he didn’t like, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, hear the issue. I also felt a bit of loneliness for Alex–all alone in the isolation booth, and he couldn’t even see the rest of the band. It was just him, his demons, and the microphone.

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But he endured, despite moments of frustration and a bit of exasperation, until he and the band got the recordings they wanted.
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Which brings me to the largest lesson of my time with Kingsblood. They spent 12 hours in the studio to record two songs, and anticipated spending another 3-4 mixing and mastering them. It will cost them (or their label) over $500 in studio rental just to record two songs. And I’m pretty sure the sound engineer gave them his time. As did the photographer.

I knew that musicians put a lot of time into creating and honing their art. I had no idea the craft of capturing that art could be that time consuming in the day of digital. I figured they would set up in a studio just like performing in a bar. Play the song through two or three times, and call it done. OK, not really. But still…

So the next time a band asks for $5 for their EP, realize that they’ve made the mistake of asking way too little. Those five bucks might cover the production costs, if they sell enough. But it does nothing to compensate them for the art they’ve created, nor give them much incentive to create more. Give them ten bucks, and it will make their day. Give them twenty (you can afford it, right? You spent that much on beer and nachos…) and you’ll be their favorite fan ever. Besides, that money will help keep these guys off the streets.

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And last, bands/musicians/performance artists: get yourself a device that will take credit cards. They’re easy and cheap, and will end the excuses that people would ‘love to buy a cd’ but they just don’t have the cash.

 

The Joshua Bell Experiment

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Several of my friends have been commenting/sharing/vectoring a Facebook post about the ‘Joshua Bell Experiment’. In summary, in 2007, world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell went to a subway station in DC, pulled out his 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius violin, and played as if he were a common street musician, including the open violin case, seeded with some of his own cash.

He played his heart out for 45 minutes, and was barely noticed by the morning commuters. You can read the full article, and even see a time lapse of his time in the station here. I strongly recommend reading the article–it’s fascinating.

The thesis of the article comes two thirds of the way through:

If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

We’re too busy, evidently, to recognize beauty, pure artistry, even when it smacks us upside the head.

The problem is that the deck was stacked against the commuters, and the perpetrators of the experiment clearly thought that the lack of artistic context could be overridden by the pure beauty.

First the deck stacked against the commuters:

  • Joshua Bell was wearing street clothes and a baseball hat. However, very few people have ever seen him perform like that. In fact, the article even talks about how he makes use of his mop in performances. Donning a hat negates the impact his full-body movement has on the visualization of his performance. And dressed in jeans, as opposed to his normal performance attire, means he might as well have been in disguise.
  • Just the fact that it was Joshua Bell means lower name and face recognition than other super-star performers. I’ve seen Bell in concert, and prior to writing this article, I had no memory of what he looked like. I’ve seen Yo Yo Ma on TV recently enough that I might be able to at least wonder if a scruffy looking cellist might be Da Ma incognito. Have Adam Levine sing and play guitar sitting on an apple box, and you’re gonna have mayhem.
  • The songs he performed were, according to the article, technically masterpieces. But beauty that is so rarefied that it is only recognized by those educated in its intricacies can be tough for a lay-person to recognize. Bach’s Chaconne, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita, something by Jules Massenet, and another, title-not-mentioned piece by Back. I’m no classical music neophyte, but I’m no expert either, and I recognize only Ave Maria, primarily because my wife loves Christmas music, and that song is included in most classical compilations. The other pieces? Well lets just say, we’re all sluts for a cover song. We’re drawn to that which we recognize. Bell probably would have drawn a freaking mob had he played Devil Went Down to Georgia.
  • I understand why he played in a subway station: lots of people streaming by, and it isn’t uncommon for musicians to perform in spaces like that, hoping for a few bucks. But during the morning rush, who allows time to stop for a little beauty on their way to work? In the early parts of the video, some people were in the same room as Bell for no more than two or three notes. Could they have been expected to recognize the greatness in that brief moment? And even if someone figured it out–”Holy shit! I think that was Joshua Bell”–30 seconds later, they’re probably already on their subway train. I think he would have drawn crowds in a high-traffic but more leisurely space, like at one of the DC monument parks–how amazing would it have been to have heard him playing Barber’s Adagio for Strings at the Vietnam War memorial? A crowd of people in tears would have surrounded him, hugged him, cried with him.
  • The population that knows that Bell is amazing is predominantly elderly (even the article acknowledges that concert goers are mostly silver-haired) and most likely retired. The population going through the subway during rush hour is definitely not retired, and probably has a median age two or three decades below the typical Bell concert. It would be like having Phil Collins walk through a middle school–he would look like just another parent in that land of confusion.

Finally, context means a great deal to us a humans. There’s a ton of psychological research that talks about anchoring and trusting authority. Put a good violin student on stage with a mop of dark hair, and a flair for body movements, and I’ll bet 80% of the people paying $100 for seats wouldn’t know that it wasn’t Bell on stage.
To ignore context is to completely misunderstand human nature. Slatkin couldn’t predict what would happen at Bell’s performance because he wasn’t familiar with the context of the performance in a subway.

Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight, but it seems to me that getting one person in a thousand to acknowledge that they recognized Bell (an important point–others might have recognized but not have had the time or desire to hang around) isn’t too bad. Given how much the deck was stacked toward Bell remaining anonymous, and how removed from context he was, I would say $52 is a pretty decent haul for a street performer in 45 minutes.

“Should I play the lottery?”

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Every time the powerball gets wicked high, I start to think about buying a few tickets. A few months ago, I spent $10 on the ‘dream’, won $4, and didn’t even bother to redeem the ticket for the cash. In theory, we all know that the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math: the 1 in 175 million chance of winning is so small, you might as well not even try. Even if you buy 10 tickets every week of your life from 18 to 70, (spending $60k in the process), your LIFETIME chance of winning once is still 1 in 6000. You’re more likely  to DIE in a bicycle accident.

Most people’s heads start to spin with those kinds of numbers, and among the middle-class employed, just play it for the entertainment value. But there’s plenty of research that says that poor, unemployed and underemployed people play the lottery at far higher rates than everyone else. So much so, that people have started to describe the lottery as a “tax on the poor”. By playing the lottery, someone who can barely afford their food for the day, is helping to subsidize government programs (aka taxes) disproportionately to their income. We call this a regressive tax, and among progressive liberals, this is pretty universally considered bad.

So, if we assume that the lottery is like a regressive tax on the poor, what is a progressive liberal to do? (I’m emphasizing ‘like’ here because the people paying the ‘tax’ are doing so willingly, and that is a key difference from other taxes.) I can think of three options:

  1. Take the free market approach–let everyone play who wants to. The problem with the free market assumption, however, is that all players in a market are equally well informed. Considering how complicated the math is, and how unlikely people are to even attempt it, and how bad people are at understanding probabilities in real life, there’s no way that a lottery is a free-market interaction. Someone is at a disadvantage, that that someone is almost always the poor and under-educated. The lottery commissions, and therefore the state tax coffers, are the ones with the upper hand in the transaction.
  2. Work to abolish the lottery–lobby governments to do away with the ‘regressive tax on the poor’. The problem here is that because people are playing willingly, there will be an enormous outcry that a popular past-time, which is seen as mostly harmless, and has some benefit to the government coffers, so you’ll be viewed as a patriarchal kook for even suggesting such a thing. Have fun being a pariah.
  3. Don’t play–its well known that smaller jackpots get significantly fewer players. As the jackpots grow, more people play, thereby getting larger jackpots, until we approach the half-billion dollar mark (to date). If you don’t contribute your small amount (and other liberal progressives do the same) then the jackpots will grow more slowly, decreasing everyone’s expenditures, meaning fewer poor will play (or will spend less on each play).

So, by not playing, and thereby not contributing to the jackpot, you’re subtly convincing others to not play as well. The more people who don’t play, either because its a ‘tax on people who are bad at math’ or because its a ‘tax on the poor’, will result in more people who don’t play.

DIY Table-top Art Easel–Easy!

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I’m in the final stages of preparing for my first print sale at my son’s school’s art sale, and I decided I needed something to help stand some pictures on a table. I’ve got some black foam-core to hang pictures on, but I also wanted to have a few standing on the table.

While I was at Staples, I asked about table top easels, and all they had were $13 models, in which, considering my print prices, I wasn’t willing to indulge. So I came home, thought about it for a few minutes, then built the following DIY easel six times over in about 20 minutes.

First, you’ll need 24″ of coat hanger wire, or something similarly stiff. I happen to have a bunch of left-over, 12-guage wire used to hang drop-ceilings (long story, don’t ask) so I just used that. But I’m willing to bet anything 12-guage or thicker would do the trick.

Cut your 24″ piece, then make a right-angle bend 10.5″ from one end (middle picture, top). Make another bend 3″ from the first (right, top), so that you essentially have a square U shape. I used a bench vice to make the next step easier, but you should be able to do it with pliers–put the U end in the vice about 1/2″, tighten it gown, and bend the loose ends down at a right angle (left, bottom). When you’re done in the vice, you’ll have something like the middle, bottom picture. Finally, bend the loose ends up 3″ from the front.

Stand it up, and adjust until it sits flat, and the open ends are almost over top of the front. If your picture wants to fall backwards, push the top ends more toward the front.

Voila, easy easel. Are they just a little bit ghetto? Yes. Did you notice how much I’m selling my prints for? If I was trying to sell them for $100 each, yes, I’d invest a little bit more. It’s hard to be this for simplicity, though.