Song Talk with Morry Campbell

Report from the field: New Logic Pro Studio

On Tuesday, I attended the "Pro Studio World Tour" event that Apple is sponsoring to promote their pro video and audio applications, Final Cut Studio Pro and Logic Studio Pro. Amazing stuff. Well worth checking out. One of the most impressive new features of both applications were the time manipulation tools. The time manipulation tool in FCP (Command + J) has been expanded, with a lot more control on how it behaves in the timeline. And in Logic, you can now quantize audio regions in much the same way you quantize MIDI regions, and the "flextime" feature has to be seen to be believed.

I'm going to keep this short, because I know not everyone who reads this blog does this kind of work, but this round of upgrades is a dramatic step up. Avid/Digidesign have cause to worry.

Apple and the Music Biz

Just keeping y'all informed...

More fuel for copyright thought

Here's another article, given attention by ASCAP in their daily brief, on the whole vexing issue of copyright protection, and by extension, piracy. Because ASCAP is promoting this article in their brief, I can only assume that I'm being asked to take it seriously. And perhaps the article's author, Willem H. Buiter, makes some good points along the way. But some of his points, and in fact one of the big, particularly "scary" points he makes, is patently ludicrous.

MySpace and Facebook and Twitter: Oh my!

Under the umbrella of Outmusic, there was a workshop for musicians this last Monday at the Center. But the kudos go to the industrious, bottomless-pit-of-energy Jed Ryan for organizing it and making it happen. Thanks, Jed.

The guest speaker was Phil Putnam, who has done very well for himself in the Indie music world, and was kind enough to offer up some of his hard-earned wisdom. Thanks, Phil.

Johann Sebastian Bach: plagiarist and copycat (and Handel too)

It happened a lot. A composer would take a line from another's work and use it in their own composition. Bach would borrow from Handel.  Handel would borrow from Bach.  Sometimes entire sets of variations were done on another composer's theme. Variations on a theme by Paganini comes to mind, Brahms being the guilty party. It was actually considered an act of respect to quote from a known piece and make it into something else. I guess they didn't have lawyers around then.

Somehow, somewhere, some lawyer got hold of some musician or composer and convinced them that this "borrowing" was actually stealing. Instead of being honored when someone else uses a part of our work to make something new, we're told, we should be incensed that they are stealing from us. And so the legal profession brings down hundreds of years of musical tradition and creativity. For hundreds of years musicians were able to look to past works as an avenue to inspiration. No longer.

One more reason you shouldn't steal music

This is pretty wild. Someone downloaded a file sharing program on their company computer at a defense contractor in Bethesda, MD, and it allowed someone in Tehran (yes, the Tehran in Iran) to download detailed plans for Marine One, the President's helicopter. Boback is the CEO of the company.

Someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, not realizing the potential problems, Boback said.

"When downloading one of these file-sharing programs, you are effectively allowing others around the world to access your hard drive," Boback said.

I guess for an indie musician, there are certain plusses to outweigh the minuses of peer-to-peer and file sharing networks. Yes, it's possible that it may help you build a fan base and get your music into the hands of some folks that would not otherwise listen to your music. But if the cost is that your potential fans leave their hard drives open to anyone that wants to poke around there, it might be cheaper in the long run for them to just buy the song. It might be not only dishonest to download free music, it may be dangerous.

Maybe CDs aren't quite dead yet

According to an article at appscout.com, CDs might not be ready for the dust bins quite yet.  It seems that around two thirds of the folks out there still paying for music buy CDs exclusively. That's nice. Well, it's better than nice, it's good. Good for us independent musicians still trying to sell our product. Although it has become cheaper over the last few years, it's still a pretty hefty chunk of change to get a CD together. This is good news, if it's reliable.