 Some time ago I started using SugarSync, a great tool for easily accessing, synching and sharing files across multiple computers and mobile devices. While this sounds a bit techy, in reality there are some awesome things you can do with SugarSync. One of them I particularly like as a composer - and that's being able to carry my music portfolio in my pocket. Now you might think you could just have a playlist setup in iTunes or something and have that stored on your phone, ready to play when needed. Sure, that would allow you to access your music on the go, but what if you wanted to quickly and easily share one of your tracks with someone? Maybe you're a muso wanting to send a demo track or two to a venue manager you just met. A player looking to join a band you've just seen play live. Or a composer keen to share a demo of your work to a prospective client... SugarSync not only enables you to access and play your music on the go from your phone, but you can simply tap a button to send a link to that track via email. Sweet. Here's a rundown of a few steps I take each time I finish a new composition. These quick steps make it easy to access and share my music anywhere, anytime, with anyone: - When I finish a new track, I use XLD to convert the large WAV file to a more transportable mp3 version
- I then drag the mp3 to an "mp3s" folder on my desktop, where all my project mp3s are stored
- This folder is automatically synched to SugarSync, which means that by just dragging the mp3 to this folder, the next time I open SugarSync on my phone I'll have access to the track - including the ability to play it and share it directly with others.
Hope you find this useful. Now get out there and spread your music to the world!
 The Music Machine Around a month ago I wrote an article titled " The Unknowns of the Top 40 Charts - Producers and Front-Liners". The post contained a summary of some less-commonly-known realities of pop music composition. After some discussion, I ended the article with the comment "When the power to the machines is switched off, all the samples and pre-programmed loops are lost and all you have is your talent, what do you bring to the table?". The response to this question was fast-received and overwhelming, including the rather comical to-and-fro which appears in the comments directly beneath my blog. However some of the most interesting feedback I received was through other forums, namely various LinkedIn groups which are not publicly accessible. I wanted to share these as a follow-on to my original article. I hope you enjoy as I did... - "Here in Nashville, it's all about the words almost to the point of negating the musical content." - Randy Gabbard
- "I'd rather see more musicians who are taking the risk of NOT using the template get in front of the same demographics of those who do. One of my fondest memories, in response to your last comment, Paul, was a time when the power went out at a Chicago venue I was playing. I stepped off the stage, walked into the middle of the crowd, and performed there instead. When the power came back on, the stage manager turned the lights back off. The machine, literally or figuratively, can bring out the best and the worst...and sometimes make you write too much." - Kevin Mileski
- "Had a great night once at a rock club in central Illinois. The power went out so the lead singer and I (on acoustic guitar) sat on the front edge of the stage and played to the crowd that gathered and sat down on the dance floor. Our soundman used a flashlight to "spotlight" us." - Bud Summers
- "In spite of all that is going on in Top 40 today, I believe that this phase shall pass and we will enter a period in the music business where talent and the ability to connect with an audience will be the defining characteristics of popular and successful artists. Adele certainly demonstrated this." - Tom Netzel
- "I think the pop charts have always been this way - a light sprinkling of genuinely creative artists with their own material interspersed amongst the plethora of manufactured pop stars. The latter often have their music carefully crafted for them by a relatively small group of talented composers and songwriters. Thee factory-line approach can produce music that is a little too similar at times, but that is sort of the point - creating or maybe sometimes just following current trends and cashing in. It can still create some seriously classic, memorable pop songs though and shouldn't necessarily be dismissed as less worthy than the more independent acts...
- Motown and Atlantic in the 1960s produced some great stuff with a seriously conveyor belt approach at times. Stock Aitken and Waterman had a few classics amongst their instant throwaway pop as well...
- Speaking from personal experience - working to guidelines / a tight structure / a formula can often be quite motivating and an actual aid to creativity - gives the mind a specific focus. " - Mark Taylor
 Earlier today a friend asked me how to set up a wireless audio system in his house. I'm sure he's not alone in asking the question, and while there are many resources providing information on how to do this online, the options and conflicting opinions can be pretty daunting at first. So here's a little overview from me to you. It is pretty simple to set up actually - pretty low tech from a user's perspective and easy to set up once the initial purchases have been made. There are also a few ways to do this. I'm not an Apple Fanboy but have found that the following Apple-based system is reliable, as long as your WiFi signal is strong enough. Other than your computer, the following two pieces of hardware are all that is needed: 1. An Airport Extreme, used as a wireless router. This is what will stream the music from your computer to other parts of your house. I have previously used non-Apple routers (e.g. Belkin) with varying levels of success. But Apple talking to Apple tends to be much easier to set up and save you hours of fruitless head-scratching and Googling. 2. An Airport Express, used to receive the audio signal streamed from your machine / router. This little unit just plugs into a power point, and has a headphone jack on the bottom. This unit receives the audio sent from your computer (via the wireless router e.g. Airport Extreme), and using the headphones jack you can just plug the output into the stereo / speakers of your choice. Out of the box you'll be able to set up iTunes to stream audio from your computer to your remote speakers i.e. whatever speakers you have which are plugged into the headphones jack of the Airport Express. iTunes will do the work to make sure the audio stays in synch, so if you walk away from your computer playing music into another room which is remotely streaming the music, it will all be in synch. Nice. With these couple of bits of hardware, you will be streaming music from iTunes. If you want to go one step further, you can stream ANY audio from your computer to your remote speakers. e.g. stream online radio, YouTube, system sounds, you name it. This is great if iTunes is not the only program you wish to be tied to when listening to music or audio. To stream any audio, get the brilliant AirFoil from Rogue Amoeba. Once set up, you can then ready my other tips on optimising the quality of your WiFi signal. More iTunes related audio tips can be found in the iTunes section of my blog. Hope that helps! Happy listening.
 The Music Machine I recently read this fantastic post from The New Yorker - " The Song Machine: The Hitmakers Behind Rihanna". It was an excellent read, albeit lengthy, so I want to share some of the main points I took away from it: - Perhaps showing some ignorance for the hit machine approach to pop music, I had never heard of Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, the team of Norwegian writer-producers known as Stargate. These guys have written the music behind some of the biggest tracks in recent pop / RnB including "Rude Boy" ("Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?") and “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na-na come on”) from Rihanna, "Irreplaceable" from Beyoncé, and Katy Perry’s "Firework".
- Stargate are one of a relatively small number of highly successful hit maker producers, who write the backing tracks to many of today's Top 40 songs. However the vocal lines are generally composed by an almost exclusively female group of "top-liners".
- The top-liners listen to the music created by the producer and within a short amount of time come up with the main melody, lyrics and the general "catchiness" of the songs we end up hearing. The outcome of this is a demo track which is then shopped out to keen stars such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga.
- Importantly this helps explain why so much Top 40 and commercial radio music is so same-y, familiar, and to many (including me) - mundane. The music is not drawn from a planet full of inspiration but from a very small pool of highly efficient producers and top liners, a small pool of professionals who survive by churning hits out quickly.
- Because of this, sometimes the musical output on the charts can be too similar. In 2009, both Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson had hits (Beyoncé’s "Halo" and Clarkson’s "Already Gone"). Both were created from the same track from producer Ryan Tedder. Clarkson wrote her own top line, and Beyoncé co-created hers with Evan Bogart. Tedder didn't mention to either artist that the other was working with his track, so both went to market and both were hits. Crazy.
- Successful top-liners include Makeba Riddick, Bonnie McKee, and Skylar Grey - none of whom are household names like the performers who make their work famous. However it is pointed out that creating the hit melody does not mean the top-liner wants (or deserves) the fame of the stars we know - after all, the Rihannas of the world are the ones everyone looks at when they walk into the room, dealing with manic publicity and touring, and needing to produce live what people come to expect from a highly polished studio album.
I enjoyed reading at the end of the article the reality check felt by these hit-making producers, especially in the wake of the monstrous success of Adele and her huge single "Someone Like You". The emotional lyrics and raw acoustic accompaniment in this track are nothing like the digital, arpeggiator-created, effect-laden music typical of the charts and these producers. With an arsenal of studio equipment and production hours, it is still not possible to formulate a timeless "classic" that will really connect with people. When the power to the machines is switched off, all the samples and pre-programmed loops are lost and all you have is your talent, what do you bring to the table?
 This is a recount of two of the coolest places to listen to music I've ever been to.
Years ago I was in a band with a guitarist who, for a short time, had a girlfriend whose parents were quite well off, living in a huge house in a suburb by the lake. Miraculously her parents never seemed to be home. Great times...
Due to the size of the place and the type of people we were back then, this home made for a great party venue. At the end of one of many wild nights, I found myself falling asleep in a very large downstairs room, a very wide open space only interrupted by a couple of plush, single-seat, white leather recliners.
The walls of the room held rows of stylish CD racks. The kind you used to find in record stores where they displayed the top selling CDs - stored in horizontal rows showing the full face of the CD artwork. Very cool.
Of course, this room was replete with a gorgeous surround sound system which was just perfect to listen to as the night drew to a close and sleep set in...
The other room I remember vividly was a completely different experience. Some friends of mine a couple of years back were in the process of house-hunting. On one of their explorations, I joined them for a brief inspection of a rather old home, adjacent to thick bushland, with none of the opulence of the aforementioned property.
One room in this place could only be described as a "listening room". It was a fair sized room, not overly large, but certainly not cramped. In the middle of the room was an old, single-seat, dark green leather chair. The chair was perfectly placed among the surround speakers of a magnificent stereo system. There were no other decorations or distractions in the room. No coffee table, no vases, no other chairs. Just a seat among the speakers.
This place has stayed in my mind for several years now, though I was only in the room for a minute at most. The scarcity of objects in the room highlighted a dedication to its purpose - listening, without distraction.
It was not a "media room", a "cinema room" or a "home theatre". It was just a seat among the speakers. And I loved it.
 A short time ago I stumble across a great post from WinkSound - with some excellent tools to help convert, play and share audio. I have since been using this trio of Mac apps to streamline sending demos of tracks I am working on to clients. But taking these free (yes, free!) apps away from an audio creation context, two in particular are indispensable for quickly and easily sending files to the cloud or listening to audio. 1. Cloud - this is a simple little app to enable very easy transfer of files to cloud storage. The basic plan is free, and fine for most file-transferring needs but not suitable so for long-term backup or storage. Once signed up, simply dragging a file into the app's icon will transfer it to the cloud. Further streamlining things, as soon as the upload is complete the link to your upload is automatically copied to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email. 2. Vox - anyone on a Mac would be familiar with the common process of being able to listen to an audio file such as a WAV or mp3 by simply highlighting the file and pressing space bar (to play it in the Finder preview window) or double clicking it to open it in iTunes. Each of these processes has its shortfalls. The preview window won't enable the audio file to keep playing in the background if you switch to another app or select another file. Alternatively, adding a file to iTunes every time you listen to something new is a time consuming and unnecessary process. Vox is a lightweight audio player which is great to get around both of these issues. I especially like the app's icon which displays a neat, circular playback progress status during play. Hope these tips help musicians and non-musicians alike.
 John Butler (by John Dudelson) In the past 24 hours, much attention has been given to a case of potential copyright infringement - the track in question being Zebra by John Butler Trio (official video below). During this week's Super Bowl, an ad for yoghurt made by Dannon in the US has featured music sounding very similar in feel and melody to Zebra (video of this ad also below) . Was this a case of unauthorised use of the John Butler Trio track? No, it is clearly a different recording. Is the music similar between the two? Yes. Now here's the kicker. Is this an infringement of copyright? Well...? Who's to say. Really - who's to say? Who will make a public, legal ruling that there has been an infringement of copyright in this case? I strongly believe NO ONE will. And I will stand corrected and surprised if this uproar amounts to anything more than an undisclosed out of court settlement between the two parties. Why? Simple. Because music is very complex and questions of similarity are incredibly hard to quantify. The instruments used, pitch, speed, melody, number and placement of rests, time signatures, additional layers added or subtracted all have an impact on how "similar" one track may seem to another - and it is all subjective. But what is the threshold beyond which a track could be seen to infringe upon another?As I discussed over 18 months ago, there is not likely to be a legal precedent set on music copyright infringement in cases like this any time soon, due to the inevitable opening of floodgates which would follow. All manner of claims of "this sounds like that" and "this bit is almost exactly the same as that bit" begin choking courtrooms. When it comes to copyright infringement like this, who'll be the judge?
 Some time ago I posted a few articles on LinkedIn groups asking for people's feedback to the question - what's the perfect soundtrack to a rainy day? As I type, I can hear rain falling on the tin roof of the sunroom outside my studio door. It's an awesome and relaxing sound. Public access isn't available to most of the LinkedIn posts which provided feedback to this question, so I'll list the feedback I received here. I must preface this by saying that these are the opinions of people who shared their thoughts with me. I am in turn sharing this with you, appreciating that music is very much about personal experience and taste. I would not wish to filter this list to exclude something you may also enjoy when the rain is falling around you. So, in no particular order, here we go - 10 songs to listen to on a rainy day:1. Sketches of Spain - Miles Davis 2. The Fountain soundtrack - Clint Mansell3. Beneath An Evening Sky - Ralph Towner, Slava Grigoryan, Wolfgang Muthspiel 4. Summertime - George Gershwin 5. Pink Moon - Nick Drake6. Rainy Nights In Georgia - Brook Benton 7. Monument - KiloWatts 8. Ommadawn - Mike Oldfield 9. It Feels Like Rain - Aaron Neville (composed by John Hiatt)10. Cumulus Rising - Alex De Grassi Enjoy.
_This past week has seen countless mentions of the 15 year old Korean girl, Park Ji Min, singing a cover of Adele's "Rolling In The Deep" on the Korean talent show KPop Star. This is a talented young singer who did a great cover of the track. However I have a simple question: Would we be as impressed by this performance if she was singing an original song? Here in Australia I've seen this footage countless times this week and there are blogs all over the web mentioning the video. The media are certainly captivated by what she has done. But let's just be reminded that this is a very loyal performance of a song we have all heard before. Are we impressed by how like-sounding she is to Adele's original? Impressed by the young age? A combination of both? I have written before of the way people listen to commercial radio and popular music - as it is generally easy, non-challenging and most of all familiar. A greater level of talent would be required to not just nail a vocal performance, but to have actually composed the song. Again, I'm not discrediting this girl's performance. I am simply lamenting my belief that if she did compose an original song and perform it to the same level of expertise, we would probably never hear of it. The sad, beautiful truth is that so much of the world's great original music will never find its audience.
 For many years now, Apple have been selling the Airport Express, a small portable unit which can plug into a power point to create a simple wireless network. One of the most popular uses of this device is to stream an iTunes library wirelessly from a desktop or laptop to a home stereo (potentially at the other end of the house / building). This is a setup I enjoy at home myself, but getting it to work correctly is not always as "plug and play" as you would hope. My stable setup these days is the result of many bleary-eyed, late night Google searches for ways to improve signal strength and decrease dropouts.If you are reading this post with similar trouble, hoping for some guiding light, I won't even begin to cover off all the potential solutions that have been offered over time (which you would likely have read to exhaustion already!). However, other than the usual suspects of improving line of sight between your sending and receiving devices (minimizing distance and walls between the two), checking you have followed correct setup procedure, ensuring security settings are consistent between sending and receiving devices, not having your microwave running or any other electrical / magnetic interference nearby, etc etc, there is a less hit and miss opportunity to improve your streaming results. ..The Channel your WiFi connection is transmitting on can be easily crowded by other communications nearby, including neighbour's WiFi networks and other equipment. The good news is, free tools are available to help check which WiFi channels provide greatest strength and least noise in your area. I have successfully used iStumbler for Mac though there are several other options including Windows-based solutions such as NetStumbler. In summary these tools will scan and discover the wireless devices and networks having an impact on your own signal strength, giving you a quantifiable reason to choose one channel over another rather than trying each transmission channel in turn and hoping it makes a difference!After a recent conversation with someone who had tried everything but never heard of this avenue, I thought it would be worth mentioning here. Hope this helps you keep the music flowing nice and cleanly from your desktop / laptop to your remote speakers. Nothing is more frustrating than wireless audio dropouts!
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