Music – Sound and Music Production

Guest Lecture – Danny Roberts 2! – A&R Decca Records

Blog post by L2 Audio Production student James Woodliffe.

This week Danny Roberts gave a talk to myself and my course peers about his career, day to day roles and the music industry from the perspective of a record label.

Danny is an A&R representative for Decca Records who are a subsidiary of Universal records. He discussed about the two types of A&R, artists past and present, the impact of major labels and his connection with them. It was interesting to hear Danny talk openly about his day to day runnings with the label he works for and his colleagues. It was also interesting to hear his opinion of major/indie record labels from an inside point of view and it was refreshing to hear a talk from an A&R representative who clearly has a love for music. I felt that Danny really understood his business and although money is a crucial factor it isn’t the be all and end all of his job.

Personally, I found his talk very interesting and it confirmed some of my thoughts about the music industry previously to the lecture. It also taught me new concepts and ideas that are currently present within the industry, such as how he sees potential within an artist and what stages he goes through before signing them. Overall it was very enjoyable.

Addendum:
Danny’s recent signing Aurora has just been selected as the artist for the John Lewis TV ad campaign 2015

October 29, 2015 bands, careers, featured posts, Guest lecture, Music, Music Industry No Comments

The Evolution of Western Pop Music Over 50 Years

The evolution of Western pop music over fifty years – from 1960 to 2010 – has been analysed by scientists. A team from Queen Mary University, London and Imperial College looked at more than 17,000 songs from the major American chart, the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. They found three music revolutions – in 1964, 1983 and 1991 – and traced the loss of blues chords from the charts, as well as the birth of disco. The team also refutes claims that pop music is starting to sound the same. Dr Matthias Mauch is from Queen Mary University of London and co-led the research.

Listen to the Radio 4 Today clip here:

Read The Independent piece here:

May 6, 2015 featured posts, Music, POP, Radio 4, sound history 1 Comment

Composing LA

Young British Composer Tarik O’ Regan tells the story of how the tradition of Western classical music, its composers and maestros, underpinned the golden age of Hollywood film score.

More or less the entire Hollywood music scene, as it blossomed in the 1930s, looked to serious European and Russian composers for film score composition. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, two of the greatest composers of ‘serious’ 20th century music, both lived and worked in LA – much to the consternation of the European classical music establishment.

Many composers on the run from Europe in the 1930s would arrive in New York and, failing to make inroads into the concert scene or Broadway (as Kurt Weil had done), continued their journey West. Even as early cinema flourished, America was still struggling to find its own authentic ‘classical’ music – one that strived to be equal to the European symphonic sound but that had its own voice too. The film score was precisely that.

Meanwhile most of the Hollywood film orchestras were filled with British and European émigré musicians who taught American musicians the European symphonic style that became the hallmark of Hollywood film music. This programme also explores how some of the most successful soundtrack composers today – John Williams and others – are completely caught up in that sound-world.

Presented by Tarik O’Regan, an émigré composer himself who moved to the US, with contributors including Andre Previn, Larry Schoenberg, conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and music writer Alex Ross.

Produced by Simon Hollis
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.

November 22, 2014 Composition, featured posts, film sound, Music, Radio 4, sound history No Comments

Guest Lecture – John Williams – Record Producer

As well as highly successful careers in A&R and songwriting John Williams has produced records by The Housemartins, The Proclaimers, Petula Clark and Michael Nyman and Radio 1 sessions by The Cure and Killing Joke to name but a few. This week he came to Lincoln and talked to our Audio Production students about his latest production; Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott’s What Have We Become album.

John’s fascinating and insightful talk took us through the entire process of making the record – from budgets, to arranging rehearsals, to booking the studio, to tracking and overdubs, through to the mixing and mastering stage. Full of excellent advice and suggestions, John demystified the whole process, stressing the importance of keeping things simple and always focussing on the song and the performance. Rehearsal time is absolutely key to this along with not getting too caught up in the technology of recording and unnecessary audio processing.

For our budding record producers, this was a hugely valuable lecture which gave some great insights, not only into the technical and organisational aspects of recording an album but also highlighted the people skills needed to manage groups of musicians and performers whose (often fragile) egos of can at times be a bit of a handful!

Listen to John speaking about the role of A&R on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 programme here (20/01/15):

November 18, 2014 bands, careers, featured posts, Guest lecture, Music, Music Industry, Recording No Comments

INTERSTELLAR – drowning in sound

I watched INTERSTELLAR last night. The soundtrack was (as you would expect from a Christopher Nolan film) electrifying.

Music was composed by Nolan’s composer of choice Hans Zimmer.

As I watched I realised that the predominant instruments were strings and what sounded like the biggest church organ in the world!. I wasn’t far wrong it seems.

“Over the course of the film, the core five-note melody (the soundtrack is released on November 17th, but for a taste listen to Trailer #3) is expressed in different ways. The score is an ensemble effort combining 34 strings, 24 woodwinds, four pianos, and 60 choir singers, all of which get their time to sound off. But the starring, and most meaningful voice, is the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ, currently housed at the 12th-century Temple Church in London and played in the movie by its director of music, Roger Sayer”(i)

What also became apparent is that on many occasions the audio track was so loud that at times when actors were speaking you could not hear clearly what they were saying. As I watched, my sound editor’s head said to myself “this must be deliberate, Nolan must WANT US to be straining to hear what they’re saying, to make the scene tense, threatening or downright overwhelming. I certainly thought at times that the cinema sound system was going to blow. I was being affected physiologically, my heart-rate was increasing. At other times however, quieter times, The main dialogue was relatively low in level – almost hard to hear what people were saying. This huge dynamic range (only available in cinemas) made me wonder how it will sound on DVD/streaming etc. You cant really watch a Nolan film anywhere other than the cinema it seems to me.

Afterwards some research into the sound led me to an article on this very subject, which confirms much of what I thought and far more.

https://soundcloud.com/zimmer-fans/hans-zimmer-our-destiny-lies

Here’s more from the article:-

Hans Zimmer’s score drowns out dialogue and has already broken an Imax theater, but there’s thematic significance in all that noise

“As Zimmer recently told the Film Music Society, the organ was chosen for its significance to science: From the 17th century to the time of the telephone exchange, the pipe organ was known as the most complex man-made device ever invented. Its physical appearance reminded him of space ship afterburners. And the airiness of the sound slipping through pipes replicates the experience of suited astronauts, where every breath is precious (a usual preoccupation with sci-fi movies that is taken very literally in Zimmer’s music, which also features the exhalations of his human choir).

Zimmer’s score—which alternates between a 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century Minimalism—of course has an element of spirituality to it. But the organ does more than just recall churches. From the movie’s earliest moments, it performs some very necessary narrative legwork for the overburdened screenplay. When it kicks in as Cooper chases down an Indian surveillance drone, a light touch on the organ keys, paired with rousing strings, creates a whirling, ethereal sound that channels Cooper’s interior life. The giddy tone it sets demonstrates that Cooper is a risk-taker and adventurer, which solves the screenplay’s early problem of establishing emotional motive for Cooper to leave his children.

As organs are wont to do, this one resonates. And there are moments when the decibels at which it does can only be described as an action-movie crutch. The organ gets a noticeably more heavy-handed touch as the plot becomes ever-more preposterous. It blasts when the elder Professor Brand, played by Michael Caine, hands over the keys to the spaceship—and his life’s work—to a farmer (Cooper) who presumably hasn’t piloted anything except a plow in a while. It booms when Ann Hathaway’s younger Dr. Brand shakes hands with “Them,” heavily foreshadowing events to come. Some of these moments necessitate the extra spiritualistic oomph, but it’s often the case that when the plot turns implausible, Nolan and Zimmer ramp up the organ.”(i)

(i)http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/why-interstellars-organ-needs-to-be-so-loud/382619/

November 12, 2014 2014, Composition, featured posts, film sound, hollywood, Industry, Music, sound design, sound editing for visual media 5 Comments

Guest Lecture – Danny Roberts (A&R Decca Records)

This week’s guest lecture for level 2 and 3 Music Production students was by Danny Roberts – A&R at Decca Records.

Danny did a brilliant job of unravelling the mysterious world of A&R and gave the students a great insight into the role of A&R in these challenging times for the recorded music industry.

Decca sits within the structure of Universal Music Group – one of the ‘big three’ major labels and Danny explained his day-to-day duties, including liaison with managers, agents, lawyers, producers and publishers. He travels a lot and he stressed the importance of networking, communication skills, and making decisions – sometimes risky ones. Studying statistics, nurturing and developing artists, and keeping up morale, also feature heavily in his role. Surprisingly, going to gigs was not particularly high on the list.

The stakes and budgets are high in the world of the major labels and I could sense that Danny’s job comes with a lot of pressure. He looks like he can handle it though 🙂 and he gave us a fascinating talk, which particularly highlighted to me how many roles there are in the music industries, and how many people are involved to support the career of a successful artist.

October 10, 2014 careers, Guest lecture, Music, Music Industry No Comments

Steve Bernard – 2013 Alumnus

I’m Steve Bernard, a BA (Hons) Audio Production alumnus from the Class of ’13. Since I graduated, I’ve been employed at Cooz’s Recording Studio, in Oxford. My relationship with the studio actually began almost three years ago, after my first summer at the University of Lincoln, when I did a week long work experience there to enhance my CV. This led to an internship which I maintained around my degree, and I was offered a job at the studio after I finished my third year.

Working at the studio has been a great experience and I’ve recently found the most success as a Hip Hop producer – we were fortunate to have a break with a South African rapper called Rowan Groom, and his contacts and reputation in the emerging local Hip Hop scene has meant that business in this genre has skyrocketed. In the last 6 months, I’ve worked with a wide array of talent, producing mixtapes and EPs local rappers and singers such as Apt Ochiela, Carby, Manny O, Ellie Robbins and Rifle.

Getting business for my work relies heavily on word of mouth and networking. Whilst I have had success in building my reputation in the Hip Hop genre, Oxford’s music scene is much better known for the rock outfits it has produced over the years – most notably bands like Radiohead and Supergrass, and more recently Foals and Stornoway – who all had humble beginnings in the live music circuit around the city. Because of this, I started an initiative at the studio called Cooz’s Live, which offers bands the opportunity to have their live shows around the city recorded with our mobile rig. We’ve built up strong working relationships with a number of venues and promoters in the city, and eventually led to us working at the o2 Academy, recording touring bands such as My Life Story and Stiff Little Fingers.

Working at the studio has placed me right at the heart of the Oxford music scene, and allowed me to network closely with a number of bands and artists. On top of working on their recent recordings, I am now the live sound engineer for two up and coming Oxford bands, One Wing Left and Fracture, and I’ve started putting on my own gigs to support the continued success of local artists. I’ve also given workshops and lectures on music production at Oxford Cherwell Valley College.

Outside of music, I continue to work in sound for other media; I mixed the sound for two documentaries recently, one of which was picked up by the BBC. The Lincoln School of Media prepared me exceptionally well for life after university. As a student, you get a broad range of in depth training in a variety of media, from experts who have been out and done it themselves, on industry standard equipment. Studying there was such a rewarding experience, but it’s only the beginning and I’m very excited by what I’ve been able to do since then!

Picture – Steve with the director Kevin Cousineau mixing the Bad Company documentary.

August 18, 2014 2013, Alumni, bands, featured posts, Hip Hop, Music, Recording, Students, Studios No Comments

All You Need Is Lab: How Technology Inspired Innovation in Music

Musician and songwriter Midge Ure looks at the many ways scientific and technological innovation have stimulated creativity in pop music.

From the invention of the steel guitar string, through the tape recorder and the synthesiser, to the drum machine and Autotune, musicians have always embraced the latest ideas and adapted or distorted them to produce new sounds.

Musicians Anne Dudley (Art of Noise) and Thomas Dolby join music journalist David Hepworth and blues researcher Tom Attah, exploring how the laboratory has informed and inspired the studio.

Midge demonstrates what you can achieve with just a laptop these days – but laments the passing of an age of invention in popular music.

Featured music includes The Beatles, Chopin, Thomas Dolby, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Charlie Christian, Les Paul and Mary Ford, The Tornados, The Small Faces, Queen, The Sweet, Stevie Wonder, Band Aid, Art of Noise, Donna Summer, Fat Boy Slim, Cher, Daft Punk and Nick Clegg.

Producer: Trevor Dann
A Trevor Dann production for BBC Radio 4

August 5, 2014 featured posts, Music, Radio 4, Recording, sound history, Technology No Comments

Producing The C-FaB Album

Blog post by level 1 AP student Rory Hunter.

Recently, myself and a team of Audio Production students at the University of Lincoln, recorded some tracks for the upcoming C-FaB Festival’s compilation album. As the music is country, folk and blues, the brief for the album was for it to sound as live as possible.

My first idea of capturing a ‘live sound’ in the studio was getting the artist/band to come in and rather than record the separate parts of the song, record a full complete performance of the song. This method brought a variety of advantages to recording along with some pitfalls to carefully think about.

The main advantage that came from this method of recording was how natural the recordings sounded. They flowed better, had more feeling in them and felt more of a real representation of the artist and their music. Performance are rarely perfect, it was the small imperfections in these performances that made it work.

The recordings came out well due to how comfortable the artists felt when performing. A studio environment can be quite alienating to some musicians, especially when they are more used to playing live. So when asked to just perform a song as they would at a gig, it felt a lot more familiar and comfortable for them. This is certainly beneficial for bands as they are more used to performing with each other rather than separately.

Inevitably the pitfalls we had to be aware of were technical ones. The first thing was microphone placement. Although this is important in all studio situations, there were more things to consider than usual. Avoiding spill between microphones was something we were always checking and thinking about. We knew it would be impossible to completely eliminate this from happening but we tried our best to reduce it. This was obviously easier to do with the solo artists, (although the acoustic guitars had a tendency to pop up on the vocal mic). However, with bands, we had to think about where each instrument would be in the live room and how we could isolate it. We used methods such as foam boards and grouping certain instruments together and giving them their own place in the room.

Our main incentive for making sure we did a good job on microphone placement was to make the tracks easier to mix. It was in the mixing stage we would truly find out how good a job we had done with our microphone placement. For example, there was one track that needed the vocal level increasing and the acoustic guitar level decreasing. However, due to the acoustic guitar spilling in to the vocal mic, a relatively simple task became more complex and required some clever mixing.

Sticking to our brief of recreating a ‘live sound’, we avoided as much we could in altering the sound with any plug-ins as such. It felt more like polishing a performance rather than mixing individual performances in to one track. However, panning was hugely important to the mixing of the tracks. Particularly with the tracks with more parts, it was key to making the tracks feel fuller and richer and give each instrument its own place in the mix.

Overall, I feel that going for a ‘live sound’ was extremely beneficial to the album. It really suits the genre of music and represents the festival well – an event that is all about live music. Although it wouldn’t be suited to every genre of music, I would definitely experiment with this recording style again as I feel it has a lot of potential benefits.

C-Fab album tracks recorded and mixed by Rory Hunter, Vashti Hayes, Anthony Belcher, Matt Jones, Adrian Rayworth, Jack Martin and Gaz Bailey.

May 23, 2014 bands, featured posts, Music, Recording, Students No Comments

The 45 @ 65

Sixty-five years ago RCA Victor launched a small, round, plastic green disc on to the listening public. Journalist David Quantick charts people’s love affair with the 45 rpm single and examines one of the most important revolutions in the modern music business.

The single was always aimed at the younger generation, while the LP originally catered for a middle-aged, middle-class, well-heeled audience. The cheaper 45 took on the poorer, cooler youth market and spun with it. The vinyl single launched rock and roll, pop and the teenager on the world and provided a lynchpin for Western popular culture. It has defined the popular music of last 60 years and shows no signs of dying.

In the first programme, David looks at the war of the speeds and the early, glory days of the vinyl single, which pitted stars like Judy Garland up against Frank Sinatra and then brought audiences Elvis and Bill Haley. All this, set against a brave new world of cheap ‘portable’ record players, exotic new vinyl jukeboxes and the birth of the singles charts.

David also examines the early days of the charts, the effect the single had on that new phenomenon, the teenager, the power the TV Music shows had on the single and the cultural power of the 45, from the revolution of rock and roll to teeny and weeny boppers and glam rock’s children of the revolution.

The series features contributions from Tom Jones, actor Martin Freeman, Myleene Klass, songwriter Diane Warren, musician Soweto Kinch, Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne, Michael Bradley from The Undertones, the Reverend Run, DJ Cosmo, Pete Shelley from The Buzzcocks, Pete Waterman, as well as DJs including Mike Read, David Jensen, Johnnie Walker, Bob Harris, and Bill Brewster Neil Fox amongst others.

Presenter/ David Quantick, Producer/ Anna Harrison and Frank Stirling for Unique Broadcasting

Episode 1

Episode 2

April 13, 2014 featured posts, Marketing, Music, Music Industry, Radio, sound history, Technology No Comments

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Content

Hans Zimmer’s score drowns out dialogue and has already broken an Imax theater, but there’s thematic significance in all that noise