Category: creativity

creativity

Possibilities

Last night I was invited by some friends to sit down and watch Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, a DVD that embodies many of the ideas I’m attempting to realize with The Miraverse.

First, there is the premise, which Herbie lays on the line straightaway: that to grow as a musician, he must walk outside the lines of his comfort zone, meeting other artists halfway or more than halfway.  In the first few segments, he explains this idea of sharing, give-and-take, and you can see the chosen artists saying “yes” but acting as if “OH MY GOD!  IT’S HERBIE HANCOCK!!  WHAT DO I DO?!?!?”  It takes Herbie a few times to really get the message “just be yourself” through through to them.

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John McLaughlin — Meeting of the Minds

Meeting of the Minds (DVD cover)

The DVD of my dreams has just been released by Abstract Logix, and I’ve already started buying it by the dozen: John McLaughlin’s Meeting of the Minds, the making of Floating Point. It is my hope that when Manifold Recording opens and The Miraverse comes into existence that we will be hosting musicians and archiving such creativity and experiences as the Meeting of the Minds DVD captured.

I’m a big fan of John McLaughlin’s music and musicality. When he came to Durham last year, I was lucky enough to procure 4 tickets to his Fourth Dimension concert so close to the stage I could touch it. At that time we had already received zoning approval for the studio complex, but we had not yet received a building permit. I went to that concert at the Carolina Theater of Durham both as a fan and as a prospective producer. How would his live concert measure up to what I believe could be an even better experience–an opportunity to see and participate in the creative process with a musical genius like John?

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Remembering a Dream: Queen's Night at the Opera

Brian May re-visits Rockfield Studios and helps piece together the history behind Bohemian Rhapsody.  What a great bit of history, and what a great motivation to do everything we can at Manifold Recording to capture everything that technology allows: HD (or better) video, high-rate 24-bit audio, the works.  Enjoy!

Linda Ronstadt had her chance…but who’s going to get it now?

Growing up in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt was one of the first female vocalists that made me want to spend more time on the Rock and Roll side of the FM dial and less time listening to classical music on our local NPR affiliate, WMHT. But a few weeks ago, completely by chance, I heard her talking about her experiences in the Music industry as a special guest of the NPR news quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, and the course of the interview practically wrote a blog posting for the Miraverse concept. Here’s my transcription of the relevant stories:

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Fletcher writes about Discipline

One of my favorite internet forums is gearslutz.com. Filled with professional recording engineers, producers, and a reasonable number of musicians, it’s a great resource for reading about the technology, techniques, and aspirations of making great recordings. One of the posts to kick off the new year asked about discipline, and I particularly appreciated the response by Fletcher, one of the more colorful commentators on the list.

He begins by saying:

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eSession.com — a modern way to produce music

Just before the new year I learned about eSession.com, a very well designed portal for hiring session musicians and producing music.  Gina Fant-Saez has done a fantastic job engaging world-class studio musicians, engineers, and producers (who have a minimum of 15 major album credits) and creating an environment where requests can be made, tracks can be played, and talent can be paid.

I hope to meet with CEO Gina Fant-Saez on my next trip to Austin and discuss with her how the great work her team has done could possibly meet the infrastructure requirements of Manifold Recording and provide a commercial engine for The Miraverse.  It is exciting to see so many good potential frameworks for launching a new generation of creative and commercial approaches to 21st century music production.

The Track Shack opens its doors

From their press release:

SACRAMENTO, CA — January 1, 2008—TheTrackShack.com today launched a brand new marketplace for musicians and fans to buy & sell CDs, Songs, and Tracks. Featuring the first ever CD mastered to offer production-level tracks, Bumped Up To First Class, the new site allows musicians to upload songs, including individual tracks, mix minus ones, videos, lyrics, and sheet music.

Why didn’t I think of that? 😉

Actually, there seems to be much more to it than just that, including a section for studios to list themselves and their services, artists to do the same, etc. Very much a one-stop-shop. I hope it becomes a viable means to unlock and refactor creativity and commerce in the music industry.

Stephin Merritt exposes his creativity

The NPR show All Things Considered issued a challenge earlier this year: write and record a song—in two days. Stephin Merritt took them up on their challenge, enjoying the benefits of NPR’s beautiful recording studio (studio 4a) fully stocked for his creative purpose.

You can see a video of that two day creative sprint on the NPR website, and you can form your own opinions about whether the challenge or the result are for the ages or not. My question is more technical: how well did the studio itself perform? How well did the video capture the creative process at work? If you had access to all 48 hours of recorded materials (multitrack inputs, video cameras, computer monitor outputs, etc), what would you want? What would you cut?

As Stephin himself acknowledges, the song itself had only one section–most popular music has at least two and usually three–so perhaps two days was a bit short. What could have been done in three days? What about five? And what about an elegant corpse model of music composition–what if three artists had been given the image and the word that one had selected, they agree on the key, tempo, and major thematic device (in this case, 1-9-7-4), and one did the verse, one did the chorus, and one did the bridge? How exciting might that have been upon reveal?

If you have links to similar experiments, please share!

This American Life—the remix

I have always been a huge fan of This American Life because of all the shows on our NPR affiliate station WUNC that I listen to during the week, none make me laugh or make me cry so more rapidly, so frequently, or so powerfully as a typical episode of This American Life. A few months ago my wife Amy burned me a CD and said “you’ve got to listen to this—it’s so Miraverse you will die!”

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Experience is the new luxury

I didn’t say it–Robert Frank did. Robert Frank covers the topic of wealth for the Wall Street Journal, and I have to say that his advice on which $1M watch to buy, or which $750,000 bottle of wine is ready for drinking is a bit too rich for my wallet. But his latest column (which builds on several earlier columns) boils down to this: stuff for the sake of stuff is just not that satisfying. That’s terrible news for people who expected money to buy them happiness in the form of sports cars, yachts, beach houses, and other property, but no surprise for those of us who find happiness in the doing (rather than the buying) of things.

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