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Capturing Your Voice
March 31, 2020 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, capturing your voice, do it yourself recording, home recording, music, nquit, recording magazine, recording on a budget, recording rappers, vocal recording

Vocal recording in a home studio

This article first appeared Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

It’s a fine art, hearing your recorded voice and not dying of shock.  But let’s assume you’re over that, and that you’re not accustomed to $500,000 recording budgets.  You’d probably still like to record your vocal tracks professionally and efficiently.  Whether you’re a crooner, a diva, a rapper or a writer recording demos, cutting a great vocal track at home is very doable. 

Let’s dive into that process, so you have the tools to record vocals you can be confident about.  I’ll talk from the point of view of a vocalist recording their own vocals, but everything applies to recording someone else in your space. 

There are two major things you need to accomplish in any recording session, and it’s no different for vocals.  First you need a killer performance.  Next you need to capture it cleanly.  Let’s tackle those in reverse order. 

Recording 

Before you think about your performance, let’s take away everything that would get in the way, and make sure when you hit your stride, it’s getting on tape.  We’ll go from the ground up, starting literally with the room. 

Acoustics  

It doesn’t matter what your mic or voice is like, if your space isn’t right, your track won’t be right.  There are a few ways you can go about adjusting your space, but the main is keep noise and unwanted room reflections out of your track.  If you have a room that’s a little bit live and sounds awesome, that can be great sometimes, but I wouldn’t recommend printing a lot of reverb on most tracks.  What I’m usually looking for is a super dead and even sound, so I have flexibility later.  The best way to do this is in a booth.  You can purchase a fancy vocal booth, or you can build one.  I’ve always been fond of a coat closet, either treated completely, evenly and thickly with acoustic treatment like Auralex foam or ridged fiberglass, or chock full of clothes.  My favorite vocal booth was a little bedroom closet we called “The Old Man Clothes Room”.  It was full of about twice as many clothes as really fit, because I’d inherited a wardrobe from a friend of the same size who passed away.  That “booth” was dead, quiet, and perfect. 

What you don’t want is to stand inside a closet without a good amount of treatment.  If you were to stand in an empty closet, for example, your track would sound incredibly boxy and probably nasally or wooden.  You don’t want to stand in a normal sized bedroom with no treatment whatsoever, as you’ll have similar room reflection issues.  No matter what you do, do not put yourself in a corner facing in.  If you feel like you can’t treat your room at all, and you have no booth or closet, you could try vocal reflection filters like the sE Reflexion Filter or the Aston Halo Reflection Filter.  These small “filters” surround a mic and block reflections.  They’re ok, but they don’t really prevent reflections from the room behind and above you from coloring your sound.  In a pinch, this may be better than nothing, but if you can, deal with your room.  It’s not hard to do something quick and dirty like hang tons of blankets up or surround yourself in mattresses.  Be creative. 

The advantage of a booth over recording near your desk is that you can isolate better from gear noise.  If that’s not an option, see if you can quiet your computer down by baffling reflective surfaces, or move your vocal position away, and/or use a directional mic aimed away from gear.  If you’re in a booth or another room, you can use a remote or set up some lead in before the song so you can get into position.  At home, where my mic is about 4 steps from the desk, I usually give myself 8 measures of click before the song, and then have the click turn off. 

Speaking of noise, you will contend with noisy streets, barking kids and crying dogs.  If you have the money, you can build a truly isolated room, but that’s rarely an option, so timing is your best friend.  Understand when the quiet times are in your space and use that knowledge to your advantage.  That may not be at night.  I once had a studio that was very quiet EXCEPT at night, when crickets would blare outside the window. 

Mic Choice 

The “best” vocal mic is really the one you can afford that is compatible with your voice.  That said, a large diaphragm condenser of some kind is probably your best bet.  See if you can get a local music store to let you test some.  I use an AKG 414, which I love for its detail, but sometimes I find it harsh for my tenor belting.  You might find it perfect, or terrible.  I’m quite fond of Rode’s selection of affordable condensers, and I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Slate VMS lately (that’s a mic and emulation package which could give you some nice options if you’re recording other people).  It’s also nice to have a good directional dynamic on hand.  Sometimes a classic Shure SM57 can surprise you.  A ribbon might be a nice choice, especially for softer vocals, but try not to scream into it – most ribbons are very delicate. 

Don’t just spend as much money as possible.  A U87 is a pretty awesome piece of equipment, but it may not be right for your voice.  When you’re shopping, start by asking friends or Facebook groups, and be sure to explain what kind of vocalist you are.  Whatever you do, get a pop filter, or make one from a coat hanger and some panty hose.  Of course, remember that the better your space, the better the mic will do.   

Signal Chain 

You can spend a lot of money on preamps and vocal processors, and there are a lot of really cool choices out there.  The main thing you need is a preamp that you trust that delivers a clean sound, and a way of recording.  I’ll assume you’re already set up with some kind of DAW and interface, and you’ve given some thought to the workflow and signal quality there.  If you’re looking for a special vocal preamp, the advice is the same as for mic choice.  Shop around, keeping in mind the type of vocals you’re recording, the style and your budget.  I use a single ART Tube MP preamp, because I like the sonic flavor and the limiter comes in handy.  That’s a pretty cheap piece of equipment, and most gear snobs would scoff, but it’s simple and effective.  If you’re not planning on recording multiple tracks, you can save a bunch of scratch by going high quality, one channel.  Don’t necessarily opt for a tube pre just because it’s cool.  Again, test and ask, and find a mic/preamp combo that works for you. 

Once you’ve got your gear in place, do a bunch of level checking, and get your gain structure right.  Make sure you’re not sending a distorted signal to your interface, or too low a signal.  Make sure your gear is clean and well organized, and while we’re at it, organize the space efficiently.  Run your audio cables so that you don’t trip on them and keep them away from power cables and other noise sources.  Standard studio stuff. 

If you want, you can use a hardware compressor in your vocal chain.  Put that between the preamp and interface.  If you do this, I recommend subtle settings.  You can compress more later, but you can’t “uncompress” later.  Some subtle compression or limiting can help you keep your vocal signal even, and that can be nice.  A lot of vocal preamp units come with built in compressors and/or EQs, and that could be handy, but I would be judicious about using EQ when recording. 

In general, I wouldn’t print any other effects like reverb or delay onto your main vocal track, but if you want to use them to influence your performance, you can always record them separately if you have the channels.  I usually just record dry and decide on effects in the mix. 

Headphones 

You’ll need some kind of headphones.  For my money, the most important thing in your vocal recording headphones is that they make you feel inspired.  It helps if you can hear everything, and it would be awesome if they didn’t bleed into the mic.  This is truly a matter of taste.  Some vocalists like to take one ear off so they can hear themselves better.  I (usually) like to get a really great mix in the cans, so I feel like I’m already in a record.  You might try an earbud type if you’re worried about bleed.  I use the classic Sony MDR-7506s.  The main point here is, do some work to get your headphone mix to the best place for you, in a way you can repeat.  This isn’t a place I normally do a lot of experimenting. 

Speaking of repeatability, work up front to get your setup wired in permanently.  Create templates in your DAW, set up your tracks the same way every time, and permanently install your vocal station and signal chain.  Having everything ready to go at the push of a button will do more for your energy and inspiration than any other one thing.  The one exception is you don’t want to leave a condenser or ribbon mic up on the stand in the room.  Just disconnect and put that away for protection, but don’t rewire the whole chain every time you want to record. 

Performance 

Now for the important part!  Everything we’ve done so far is just ground work so the process of capturing is as transparent as possible and nothing gets in the way of what you have to say and how you have to say it. 

You probably noticed by now that performing in a studio is vastly different than on stage (or in the shower).  Some people thrive on a stage and shrink in a studio.  Some people seem to be perfect in the studio and can’t find a pitch on stage.  To get what you’re looking for in your recordings, you’re going to need to know yourself a little, and know what you’re trying to create.  Are you trying to create a perfect replica of your live self?  Are you trying to be perfect, clean and beautiful?  Are you going for a sound that just can’t be done on a stage?  This could be drastically different from song to song, but at least if you know where you’re headed and how you tick, you can get there. 

Some things won’t change much.  First of all, take care of your instrument.  Recording isn’t different from performing in that you need to be properly warmed up, hydrated, and fueled.  Some beginners make the mistake of thinking “oh I’m just doing the one song”, not realizing that you might have to sing for 3 hours solid to really capture that “one song”. 

With that in mind, rehearsal is your friend.  Earlier in my career, I felt a great pressure to cut a track the instant I figured out what I wanted to do, often while I was writing.  While that method has some merit (spontaneity, etc), I no longer do that.  I make a point of NOT turning on the mic when I’m writing.  Instead, I “capture” the performance by rehearsing it a bunch while I write (which means I warm up even before I WRITE songs), and subsequently for a few days or even weeks until what I wanted to capture is captured IN ME.  Later, I set up a session much like I might in a studio and perform what is now a well-rehearsed song.  I need far fewer takes this way.  Plus by this time its usually memorized, which gives me more room to “perform” and keeps me from rattling papers in front of the mic (a music stand solves that problem, too!).  If you’re afraid of losing an idea, you can “jot it down” with a simple voice recorder app. 

Of course, this may not work for you.  You may feel an inexorable need to write (or learn, if you don’t write) and record simultaneously, and you may be completely happy with the results when you do.  If so, do that but be willing to go back later if you need to.  The great advantage of having a home studio is you can come back as much as you need to get it right. 

The other advantage is comfort.  As a vocal engineer, the job is largely to take care of the singer in the room so they’re comfortable and can perform their best.  As your own engineer, the job is the same.  Treat yourself well.  Have tea, water or whatever comfort drink you need (but understand that slurring can occur with too much of certain beverages), record when you feel fresh, inspired and confident, and make the room the way YOU want it.  Maybe you want cave-like darkness.  Maybe inspired mood lighting.  I generally like day time sessions, with plenty of light and nature visible.  But this can change.  Some songs require a new vibe, and it’s ok to give yourself the vibe you need. 

You may also consider having an audience (or not).  Once I’m confident with a song, a few people in the room or even just a video camera causes me to turn on my “performer” self a little better.  However this can sometimes mess with my accuracy.  Other times, I prefer absolute privacy, with no one else even in the building.  You’ll need to find your own balance and listen to yourself. 

As far as position, some singers like to sit or get on a stool, and some like to stand.  It’s your choice, but in general I would recommend standing.  It’s standard in studios to set the mic a hair above singers so they have to look up just a tad.  This opens the chest for better breathing.  I’d try this if I were you, but don’t crank your neck.  Depending on your room acoustics, you may be better off stepping back 2 or 3 feet from the mic.  You might feel a bit freer this way, and if the room is right, it can open up the sound.  If you’re closer than about a foot and a half, use your pop filter.  Even if you’re decently far away, you’ll want to cultivate the ability to really express yourself while not moving the position of your face, so you get an even recording.  This is a tricky skill which usually causes stiff performances at first, but you can master it with practice. 

Generally, what you want is to find the positioning and set up that gets your mind off the mic, the recording and the technical stuff as much as possible. 

Finally, a word on editing and feedback.  First, I wouldn’t edit too much while you’re in performance mode, unless you’re very comfortable with the DAW, such that being in that “techie” space for a second doesn’t take you out of “artist” mode.  I tend to drag the front and back tails off my takes so I’m not cleaning noise later, but I don’t comp takes during a vocal session. 

Next, once you’ve got it down, perhaps after an editing session where you’ve paired down to your best couple takes, or made a comp’d take using parts from your favorites, get feedback.  Even though you’ve worked hard to get it “right” already, the best thing you can do for your quality in general is use feedback and be willing to revise.  Since you’re recording in your space, it’s not like it costs $150 an hour to do so!  That’s the biggest advantage you have. 

Go Forth 

It can be a challenge to be the engineer and artist simultaneously, and if you’re a vocalist and not an audio person, setting up your studio may seem daunting, but the truth is it’s all very doable.  Just do some diligent ground work getting your workflow right, do some good checking and rechecking to get your signal sounding good, then concentrate on your best performance.  Ease and efficiency are all about preparation, and that’s something anyone can do!  Go forth and vocalize! 

Tune That Room
November 4, 2019 by Aaron
aaron trumm, acoustic treatment, acoustics, budget acoustic treatment, home recording, recording, recording magazine, soundproofing

The art of DIY Accoustic Treatment

This article first appeared Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

Ask an amateur recordist where they spent the most in their studio, and the answer is likely a piece of gear.  Ask any PROFESSIONAL audio engineer what the most important thing in the studio is, and they’ll say acoustics.

Anyone who’s mixed in a boxy room knows how hard it can be to hear what’s going on, and plenty have experienced the sadness of a poorly translated mix that’s boomy, tinny or muddy in other places.  Or, you may have noticed the terror of vocals recorded in an empty room – that hollow, boxy sound that should be reserved for bad indie movies and tele-conferences.

The reason for these problems is sound reflecting and interacting, creating nodes (where a given frequency is cancelled by its out-of-phase reflection), peaks (the opposite condition), comb filtering, ring, flutter and plain ‘ol reverb.  The size and dimensions of a room determine where and at what frequencies problems occur, but any normal room has 3 pairs of parallel surfaces, which is the worst possible situation for acoustic interaction.

These facts are becoming more apparent to musicians, and there are fewer square boxes with $10,000 DAWs and no treatment.  There are still plenty of expensive studios built to spec, but what about bedroom studios, renters and low budget recordists?  Can they build a trustworthy space they can use to get great results?  Yes, and it’s not that hard.

Before We Begin

First off, let’s distinguish “acoustic treatment” from “sound proofing”.  “Sound proofing” means ISOLATION, which is different than treatment.  Isolation means making a room that lets no sound in or out.  Doing this effectively takes structural work (which renters can’t do), and is a very different physical phenomenon than treatment.  Treatment is making a room sound and function better as an acoustic space, by taming or eliminating reflections INSIDE the room that cause problems.  We’re talking about treatment, not isolation, and the great thing is we can do all of our acoustic treatment ourselves.

We also won’t talk about measurement.  While measuring a room’s acoustic response with testing equipment and by calculating modes and resonances using room dimensions can be useful in some situations, generally the solutions are always the same.  So measurement is outside scope of this article.

Low Frequencies First

Figure 1 – The author’s incredibly terrible early attempt at treatment

Often home recordists just tack a lot of acoustic foam or egg shell mattress on every wall (figure 1).  This can be ugly, and it doesn’t work very well.  In a room like that, you might clap your hands, hear no reflections and think you’re done. The problem is clapping can’t tell you what’s happening with LOW FREQUENCIES.  When you tack up acoustic foam, you’re only dealing with high frequencies.  To illustrate, consider this chart:

Material 125HZ 250HZ 500HZ 1000HZ 2000HZ 4000HZ
OC 703 0.17 0.86 1.14 1.07 1.02 0.98
OC 705-FRK 0.60 0.50 0.63 0.82 0.45 0.34
Sculpted Acoustic Foam 0.11 0.30 0.91 1.05 0.99 1.00

Absorption coefficients – 2 inch thick material applied directly to a wall.

Absorption coefficient is a number that represents how much sound is absorbed by a given material at a given frequency.  In this small chart you can see that at 2 inches thick, all these materials have pretty pitiful absorption below 250HZ.  You can also see that Owens Corning 703 and 705 rigid fiberglass (or equivalent) does a better job than typical acoustic foam.

There’s a better approach, and that’s to build from the ground up, frequency wise.  Start your design with LOW frequencies.  Low frequencies (below about 200hz) behave differently than higher frequencies, so the solutions are different, and it’s low frequency reflections that cause nightmares like boomy rooms, weak low end response, or untranslatable mixes.

There are a couple of common misconceptions to address here.  One is that if you listen at a low volume with near field monitors, the room isn’t a factor.  Actually, sound is always reflecting and interacting, and those reflections must be dealt with.  Another is that low frequencies don’t have time to “develop” in a small room and thus aren’t a problem.  In reality, low frequencies are always present and reflecting off walls, even in a small room.

So what to do?  For all frequencies, there are two options:  absorb or diffuse.  It’s mostly impractical to diffuse low frequencies, so we need to absorb them.  Since that’s not a matter of throwing up some foam (unless it’s 10 inches thick or spaced 16 inches from the wall), we need other solutions.  First, start with the corners.  Low frequency build up occurs in corners, so the first and most obvious place to start absorbing is vertical corners.  There are several ways to do this, but they all boil down to spanning and/or filling the corner.

Figure 2 – Corner span bass traps

An easy, relatively inexpensive and effective way to do this is by spanning a corner with Owens Corning 705-FRK rigid fiberglass (figure 2).  These come in 4’ by 2’ foot panels, so in a typical room, it takes two to go from floor to ceiling.  705-FRK (FRK is a paper backing with a foil face) is dense – 6lbs per square foot – and isn’t as good for high frequency absorption as 703 (3lb density), but spanning a corner with it is great for low frequency absorption.  A 4 inch thick panel is best here, but 2 inches works too.  Optionally, fill the space behind the panel with fluffy fiberglass.  Face the backing into the room to reflect high frequencies if you don’t want the room too “dead”, which will improve low frequency absorption a little.

Figure 3 – Fiberglass triangles for a superchunk bass trap

Another method, the “superchunk”, is more costly, but it’s even more effective and easier to make pretty.  A superchunk is made using OC 703.  Cut the panels into triangles (figure 3) and stack the triangles into the corner.  Then cover the entire structure with some kind of acoustically transparent material (muslin, burlap, anything breathable) to make it attractive and keep the fiberglass contained (figure 4).

Figure 4 – A superchunk in action

A warning:  Fiberglass, while not toxic, is itchy and breaks off into airborne pieces.  Wear sleeves, gloves and a mask when working with it.

There are also commercial “superchunk” products.  Auralex makes a “bass trap” which is a corner piece of acoustic foam and RealTraps make a corner trap which is exactly a superchunk module with the addition of a “limp membrane” face, which increases low frequency effectiveness, just like the FRK.

If your budget’s REALLY tight, and you’re willing to compromise on effectiveness, you can fill a corner with a lot of things.  I once filled a corner with old clothes and contained it using pegboard (figure 5).  This isn’t as effective as a superchunk or 705, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  You could also stack fluffy fiberglass bails in corners without even removing the packaging.  It’s ugly, but effective if you have room.

Figure 5 – An odd bass trap in the author’s former studio

Vertical corners aren’t the only corners in a room.  There are also the floor/wall corners and wall/ceiling corners.  In most rooms, you should absorb as much low end as you can afford to, and you really can’t do too much, so consider doing something there (figure 6).

Figure 6 – A drum studio with corner traps and ceiling traps

Corners are a great start, but probably not enough.  Especially with LF absorption, effectiveness is about treating a high percentage of the surface area in the room.  As mentioned above, it’s effective to put up very thick material or space it out from the wall a good ways (think 4 inches with a 16 inch gap).  That takes a lot of space and still isn’t very effective below about 125HZ, but there are other solutions.

Figure 7 – An untreated beam ceiling is a great opportunity

In an unfinished space with support beams (figure 7), you can put a couple nails in and rest a piece of 705 on them, creating a ceiling trap.  You should probably cover that with fabric (figure 8). 

Figure 8 – Beamed ceiling in process of treatment

Optionally, fill the space above with fluffy fiberglass.  For a no budget alternative, foam and old clothes might work (figure 9).

Figure 9 – Poor man’s beamed ceiling treatment

Panel Traps

All of the solutions we’ve discussed so far are called “velocity absorbers”, because speed drives sound into the material, and that’s dampened when waves hit it.  Panel Traps work on a different principle and are called “pressure absorbers”.  Placed at room boundaries, they take less space and can be effective to lower frequencies (figure 10). 

Figure 10 – Panel traps for bass absorption

A panel trap is a little more complex to build, but it’s decently cheap and easy.  The main difference is that a panel trap is a sealed box with a thin plywood face and fiberglass inside (figure 11).  They’re usually sealed to the wall, but can be made to stand alone, as long they’re located at a boundary.  I’ve built several, once with futon slats I found in a dumpster!  While panel traps take a little more effort to make, they’re an awesome way to increase low frequency absorption with little space, and since they’re reflective at high frequencies, won’t make a room too dead sounding.  Plus, you can paint on them and make them pretty.

Figure 11 – The innards of a panel trap

There’s a great tutorial on how to build panel traps by acoustician Ethan Winer.  I highly recommend referring to it:  http://ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html

The Highs

Once you’ve dealt with the lows, it’s time to deal with highs and mids, and the physics here are much easier.  High frequencies can be thought of like a ray of light – they bounce off of reflective surfaces at the same angle they come from.  Any surface that shouldn’t reflect, you can absorb or diffuse.

Figure 12 – A slat diffusor

Diffusors spread reflections in an even manner.  They’re a great way to even things out while preserving liveliness.  You can build several types of diffusors or buy them, sometimes for a decent price (figure 12,13).  If you’ve got no budget, you can create some semblance of diffusion with book cases and other random items.  While an acoustician would say this isn’t true diffusion, in practice it works ok if things are various sizes.

Figure 13 – A QRD diffusor

Real diffusion is a great way to even out the sound of a room and keep it live, but it doesn’t work in small spaces.  A typical bedroom is too small for effective diffusion, so strategic absorption is often the best bet.  For that reason, that’s all we’ll say about diffusion.

High frequency absorption is the easiest to deal with.  2 inch OC 703 absorbs beautifully down to about 400HZ, and there’s a trick you can use to increase absorption even more.  Mount panels away from the wall.  The ideal distance is the same as the thickness of the material, so mounting 2 inch panels 2 inches away from the wall or ceiling is perfect (figure 14). 

Figure 14 – Absorbing panel spaced from surface

Where to mount them depends on the room and your needs, but if you’re treating a mix/control room, you should start with a “reflection free zone” (RFZ) around the main listening area.  You can see where to treat with a mirror, or just sit in your chair and look left, right up and down.  These are parallel surfaces you should treat.  You should maintain left-right symmetry, and you should treat that area of the ceiling, but leave the floor alone.  If there’s carpet you’ve got some high frequency absorption already, but that’s not ideal for various reasons, so leave the floor as is if it’s wood or another hard material.  You can always throw a rug down for extra deadening.

There are a few options for materials here, and if you have to settle for egg crate foam, do it.  If you have to nail a bunch of blankets to the wall, go for it.  Ideally, make panels using OC 703, and cover them with an attractive but breathable fabric.  Spacing of these panels from the wall can be as simple as four wood blocks from a scrap heap (figure 15).

Figure 15 – Spacer blocks salvaged from scrap heap

If you’re treating another kind of room – say a recording room or home theater – then you probably want an even sound everywhere.  If you space high frequency absorbers around, alternating with either panel traps or plain wall, you’ll start to create a kind of “pseudo diffusion”.  If you have no budget, don’t be afraid to nail blankets to walls, just remember: the thicker the better.

Creating a booth is pretty easy if you have a closet.  You can pack the closet with clothes, hang blankets from the walls, or use a more professional approach and install fiberglass panels.  In a booth, you want the deadest sound possible, and that’s about all there is to it.

I keep mentioning rigid fiberglass because it’s the best sound absorbing material and it’s cheaper than acoustic foam products, but if you can’t spend money, there are plenty of alternatives.  You can even go around your neighborhood and ask if anyone has anything “soft” they need to get rid of!  This can work great – but it may not lead to the prettiest space.

Modularity And Aesthetic

We’re talking about DIY acoustic treatment here, rather than permanent professional studio installations.  So you may have to move your studio when you move to a new space.  Or if your “studio” is a shared space, you might have to try for a pleasing look.  Even if it’s not, you may tire of working in a space that looks like the inside of an egg-carton or a construction site.  There are plenty of ways to treat a room and make it ugly, and plenty of ways to permanently install treatment and effectively ruin the room once you leave, but it’s just as easy and not necessarily that costly to do things in a way that doesn’t leave a mark, is easy to move, and is nice to look at.

Figure 16 – High frequency absorbors designed to hang like paintings

In my current space, everything is built to move.  All of my high frequency absorbers are small painting size boxes with pretty frames and colorful fabric faces (figure 16).  They hang just like any picture (figure 17). 

Figure 17 – HF absorbors hanging like paintings.

Ceiling treatments are lightweight and hang from tiny hooks (figure 18). 

Figure 18 – HF ceiling panels in author’s studio

My “superchunk” is really 4 small modules that I can take out and move (figure 19), and my panel traps are standalone boxes set on the floor or hung with picture wire, with decoupage designs by an artist friend (figure 20). 

Figure 19 – Modular superchunk corner trap.
Figure 20 – Author’s panel trap with art by an artist friend

The room doesn’t necessarily look normal (figure 21), but it’s certainly not crazy making like my first attempts 20 years ago.  In fact a lot of people mistake my HF panels for art.

Figure 21 – The author’s one room studio space.

Just Do It

Nothing we’ve talked about here is much different than what would be done with a big budget, except structural work.  Other than that, acoustic treatment on a budget can be as good as any expensive installation.  You can hire contractors and consultants to design and build, or you can follow some pretty straightforward principles and do it yourself.  It’s one place where you really needn’t compromise, and it’s the one place where you really shouldn’t.  So have fun and get your room tuned up!

Keeping Track
August 12, 2019 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, audio, metadata, metatagging, metatags, recording magazine

Meta-tagging and the data you need to keep 

This article first appeared Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

It may not be a glamorous notion, but handling data properly is one of the biggest differences between a professional and an amateur in music production.  When it comes to selling music to other professionals or making sure your image is awesome when fans find you, good tagging and tracking of recordings is of the utmost importance.  So we’re just going to dive into the where, how and why of keeping your metadata. 

Metatags 

Simply put, metadata is data about other data.  In our case, it’s data about audio data.  Metatags are how files embed this metadata into themselves.  This could be anything from the title of a song to the format of a file.  Audio file formats include various amounts and types of metatags, and you’ll want to fill in this data where appropriate.  We’ll talk about what you’ll need in a bit, but let’s start by talking about a couple of file types and their metatags. 

WAV 

Wav files are our most common uncompressed audio format.  Technically these files have metadata in them, but it’s all technical data about the file (more on that in an upcoming article), and nothing you want to touch.  From our point of view, WAV files contain no extra data.  Don’t confuse this with the metadata that gets amended to a Red Book CDDA file, which is the way CD Players know things like song title and artist name.  This data is stored in the Red Book file, not in the .wav itself. 

MP3 

MP3’s are currently the most common compressed format, which is usually how we deliver downloads to fans and associates.  Mp3’s ubiquitous nature may change, but probably not soon, and since Mp3s carry so much useful metadata, they’re good for getting the concept down.  There are a couple of different metadata formats associated with Mp3s – ID3v1 and ID3v2 – but we really needn’t  concern ourselves with that right now.  What’s important right now is what data we need. 

Others 

Many other audio file formats exist for audio, including AIFF, OGG and Flac.  Some carry useful metadata and some don’t.  We’ll be diving into file formats in more depth in a later piece, so for now, let’s stick to the basic concepts and use Mp3 as our basic guide. 

What You Need And Why 

So what data do we want to associate with a song?  Obviously the title and artist name would be a good start, but there’s a lot more than that.  To start to understand what you really want to embed in a file, you just need to think about the purpose of a recording.  There are a few potential purposes.  You might be selling the tracks to fans, you might be giving the tracks away for promotion, and you might be using the tracks for business-to-business transactions, such as licensing. 

The Author’s Database

That last scenario is the big one.  When you pitch a track to an agent or a music supervisor, there’s a wealth of information they need to make it easy to potentially use a song.  Fortunately, some of it is the same stuff you want your fans to have, and all of it also serves the purpose of creating a professional look and feel to your work.  So, let’s look at some information from the extended Mp3 standard that we might want. 

  • Title
  • Artist 
  • Album 
  • Album Artist (could be different than the track artist) 
  • Grouping 
  • Composer 
  • Year 
  • Track number (# of #) 
  • Disc # 
  • Genre 
  • Comment
  • BPM 
  • ISRC  (a unique identifier for a given recording) 
  • Publisher 
  • Copyright 
  • URL
  • Album Cover 
  • Lyrics 

Title, artist and album are pretty self-explanatory.  If your song has a featured artist, put that in the TITLE, not the artist.  This way, programs like iTunes don’t separate the song from your others, creating organizational havoc for your listeners.  Album artist might be different, say if you’re a guest on a compilation or something. 

Fill in the year, track number if the song is part of an album, and if the album is some sort of multi-disc set, fill in the disc number.  This is kind of an antiquated notion unless you’re also releasing a physical product like CDs. 

If you fill in your genre, make it as accurate as possible, and don’t overload it.  Use no more than 3 genres (most of the time, it’s a dropdown anyway).  Especially when it comes to licensing, your agent or music supervisor or indie film maker needs to be able to find you in a genre search and not be way off. 

Grouping was intended originally for movements in classical music, but you could use this for subgenres, or some people use it to identify the companies clearing the mastering and publishing sides of a song, which just means who a person has to deal with to pay for a licensing. 

In the composer section, you can list all the composers or the main composers, and if you have writer information, such as writer’s percentage and performing rights identification number.  This is also a good place to identify a public domain song, or if it’s a cover, the original writer. 

Comment may be the most useful section.  Here’s a good place for contact information, which is especially important if you’d like somebody to license your music and pay you!  It’s a good idea to put your website in here, writers splits if you don’t put them in composer, the key, time signature, or any songs or artists the song sounds like.  Also helpful is any identifying info from your performing rights organization, such as BMI # or ISWC (an international standard song identifier), or even the ISRC, which, if you have one, is a unique identifier connected to a given recording.  Another useful thing to do if you’re pitching for licensing is include a link to an instrumental version somewhere on the web.  The comment section is limited, so be judicious with your character count. 

BPM, or tempo, can be important for anyone looking to use your music in a video production, or for DJs who’d like to work your song into a set.  If the song is published, or you have a publishing company, you can enter that info and your copyright info (you can do this even if you have yet to register), and you may find a separate URL tag.  Use that, but also put your website in the comment section. 

Album cover is super important.  Imagine when you open an mp3 from a pro – there’s always an image.  Make sure, if your track is for sale or any kind of public consumption, that you get some kind of cover image in there.  Square is best.  Pro tip:  album cover, title and artist are the only things you will see in every mp3 player. 

Of course, lyrics are also an option.  It’s up to you whether to include lyrics, but if you intend to pitch the song, the lyrics are quite helpful, and it’s a nice thing for fans to have.  Not all players will show the lyrics, but iTunes does. 

How To Do It 

If you’re wondering how to fill in your metatags for, say, an mp3, it’s not difficult.  Many software packages do this.  Some mastering software will let you create tags right in the software, some audio software such as Audacity have metatag features, and there are dedicated tagging packages such as Mp3Tag, TagScanner (both free), Tag & Rename and MediaMonkey, to name a VERY few.  A lot of packages support various formats like AIFF, as well.  You can even add metadata when using command line mp3 encoders, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

Editing MetaData in iTunes

Probably the easiest thing to do is open your song in iTunes, click “info”, and edit the tags to your heart’s content.  When you do this, you’ll notice that you can do this to any mp3, which means that anybody can change your tags around.  You’ll have to live with this.  It’s how people organize their collections. 

If you try a few different packages, you’ll see some variation in what tags are available.  iTunes doesn’t include the ISRC, URL, publisher or copyright tags for example.  This doesn’t mean they aren’t there, but if you were to open the file in a package that does use those tags (TagScanner, for example), you’d see they’re blank. 

TagScanner – the Author’s favorite free MetaTag Editor

In any case, you’ll edit your tags, and hit save.  The metadata is embedded into the file. 

But Wait… 

You can keep a lot of the data you need to associate with a track in the metatags embedded in the file, but you may find that you need more data at your fingertips.  For example, if you submit your track to a few micro-licensing libraries, you’ll find yourself entering in a description and mood over and over.  So, it behooves you to keep some information somewhere connected to your songs, so you don’t have to dig around every time you need it.  You can keep a simple spreadsheet, use a database, or there are a number of software packages and online solutions that can help you keep organized. 

You should keep all the data you would put in a metatag handy, plus more – here’s a big list of data you might want to keep, if you were to use a simple spread sheet: 

  • Credits – any players, engineers, studios, etc that should be credited. 
  • Title 
  • Artist/Act Name – you may have more than one, so keep track if you do 
  • Description – a short description of the song that tells people the basic topic, mood, genre and instrumentation 
  • Moods 
  • Release date – you’ll get asked for this a lot 
  • Album – if it’s part of an album, keep track of which 
  • PRO # – the id number assigned when you register the song with BMI, ASCAP or your PRO. 
  • ISWC – the international song identifier used across PRO’s, issued by your PRO. 
  • ISRC – the unique identifier for the recording, issued by the RIAA in the U.S., or your ISRC agency, or your distributor (this is easiest). 
  • Publisher – if you have a publisher, or if it’s your own publishing company, or none if neither 
  • Writers splits – who owns what percentage of writing 
  • Master splits – who wants what percentage of the recording 
  • Genres – a short list of genres 
  • Time – of the track, not the day! 
  • BPM – tempo 
  • Time signature 
  • Key 
  • UPC – if you have a UPC for the track, keep it with the track info.  Keep the album UPC with your album info.  UPCs are issued by the GS1, or your distributor (this is easiest). 
  • Keywords – a comma separated list of keywords so you can copy/paste when asked for them on a form 
  • Lyrics 
  • Toggles – whether you’ve registered the PRO, copyright, Soundscan or SoundExchange.  You can use Y/N, Yes/No,1/0, whatever feels best to you. 
  • Notes – some general notes 

There You Have It 

There you go!  The topic may not have been as sexy as some other things, but metadata is the nuts and bolts of efficient communication, and it makes all the difference when you’re building a business out of music.  Keep your data clean, handy and up-to-date and you will find it a lot easier to spread the word, engage your partners, and make money.  Even if you don’t plan to build a music business, it’s nice to know where everything is.  So, fire up the computer and get organized! 

Studio Deliverables
August 5, 2019 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, audio recording, deliverables, recording, recording magazine, recording studio

Come away from the studio with more for your money

This article first appeared Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

When people talk about making money with music, they talk about two sources:  Gigging and CD/Download sales.  If you have a great live act and you’re very popular, gig money can be significant, but it’s no secret the sales side is hardly ever big, and much has been made of its imminent demise.  That part’s debatable, but it’s a fact that record sales have never been the main revenue stream for major labels or the companies that own them.  Not to mention, few of us are rock stars, and believe it or not, some people don’t want to be!  In short, the rock star business model is non-viable, and even labels know this. Thankfully, there are many other ways to generate revenue from music. 

Alternative music income is talked about a lot, but what can musicians DO to maximize income?  In this piece, I’ll focus on the first part, the part without which nothing else can happen:  the product.  Specifically, what do you need to leave the studio with in order to maximize earning potential? Or, what are the studio’s “deliverables”? 

When I think about all the hopeful bands that have come and gone in studios I worked at, who went away with only stereo mixes, I cringe.  They’d leave the studio with a brand new set of 10 songs, mixed to perfection, hoping to make it rich.  Not only is that not enough, that’s the ONLY part of the recording that probably isn’t valuable financially! 

So if beautiful amazing songs sung with passion and purpose, mixed by the best mixer in town aren’t what you want to leave the studio with, what is?  First off, of course you need those main mixes.  You might refer to these as album or straight mixes.  These are the songs that go on your CD, go out to iTunes, go your website and go on the radio…right?  Not quite. 

Radio mixes 

Your album mixes aren’t necessarily the ones that go on the radio.  So your first new deliverable is radio mixes.  Obviously, you need mixes with no cuss words.  With a DAW, it’s no problem to do a “save as” and save a radio mix, where the engineer cuts words from the vocal, or reverses them, or does some other magic to “censor” your song.  Even better, write a version of the song with no cussing, and when you’re overdubbing vocals, record the “clean” version with the same mic setup, same vocal style, etc.  This is the method Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg used to make palatable versions of otherwise un-airable songs, which also didn’t sound edited or censored.  The benefit was multiplied when anyone who bought the album heard a new, harder-core version of the lyrics. 

Lyrics are not the only thing at play though.  While not universally true if you include avant-garde shows, you might as well tell yourself that no one will ever air a song over 3 minutes.  That doesn’t mean the 4:20 album version needs to be cut.  That’s another opportunity to give a fan something more.  But whenever possible, do yourself a favor: do another “save as”, and edit a version with less intro, a shorter guitar solo, whatever it takes to get in the 3:00-3:10 sweet spot.  Just like with lyrics, it may help to perform this ahead of time. 

Next up… 

Alternative mixes 

One of the biggest possible revenue streams requiring the least amount of fame, as well as one of the best ways to develop great industry connection, is licensing.  This is another hot topic lately, and for good reason, but all you have to do is watch TV for an hour, and you will realize that however clean you made that previously raunchy lyric, you probably won’t hear it behind a movie or TV scene.  You may want to write instrumentals, but first do another “save as” and print your mix without vocals.  You can do one with the backing vocals in, but make sure you’ve got one that has zero words whatsoever.  Great lyricists may resist this, but a song WITHOUT words is usually more valuable to a video production.  Why?  Two reasons:  one, movies and TV shows have dialog, and lyrics clash; and two, your lyrics tell a story, and that story probably doesn’t fit. Without words, though, your track might go great with the story. 

As an added bonus, if you’re a vocalist with no band, you can use instrumentals as performance mixes for live shows.  If you’re very detailed, you might print an instrumental with less reverb on the instruments, for venues where the room is already pretty live.  Don’t forget that DJs like to have acapella versions they can pair with alternative beats, so print a vocal only mix. 

That’s not the end of alternative mixes.  Remember when you edited the length of your radio mixes?  You’ll want to do that again for licensing libraries.  Start with 30, 60 and 90 second versions.  While you’re at that, you probably want some 30-45 second promo clips for your website.  Make both vocal and non-vocal versions of these. 

That’s not all.  Let’s say a big movie needs a song about being crazy, and your song is actually CALLED “I’m Crazy”?  It’s perfect, but it has a horn solo, and the movie wants a bridge, no solo.  No problem, if you’ve done another edit or performed a version that has a bridge and no solo. 

You may also want an acoustic version, or, my favorite, a bunch of ready-made breakdowns.  Do just the drums and bass, just the drums, a drumless mix…use your imagination.  Remember to pay attention when you’re editing breakdowns to keep things sensical.  A fade in may have worked in the full mix but not now.  Maybe there’s a four bar drum solo which will turn into inexplicable silence in a drumless mix.  Track wisely in anticipation of this.  If your drums bleed into your vocals, you can’t use that track for your drum-free mix. You might have to TRACK multiple versions to have multiple versions available later.  (For more flexibility and responsiveness, see the sidebar where I talk about separations.) 

When it comes to alternative mixes and breakdowns, the point is to leave the studio with a lot of material in hand, so you can respond to industry needs quickly.  You don’t want to be stuck waiting for studio time to reprint an instrumental if you’re asked for it.  Not only is that inefficient, it’s not as cost effective as leaving the session with what you need. 

The point is to maximize the amount of valuable material that comes out of what you were doing anyway.  To that end, there are a couple of other things to consider; things you may not need to spend costly studio time on, but could prove valuable. 

Lead sheets, tabs and sheet music 

It took me a long time to see any value in having written music as part of the package of material that goes with a release, but they can be crucial.  If you’re a solo artist who needs musicians for live settings, lead sheets or sheet music are critical for efficient learning.  Tabs and sheet music are also publishable, giving you a possible new revenue stream, and if you’re submitting demos to publishing companies, they often require lead sheets and lyric sheets.  It’s very valuable to have proper musical documentation.  For natural improvisers, this can be tedious, but I highly recommend putting in the effort. 

Video and photos 

Behind the scenes footage or footage of performances in the studio may not always be directly monetizable, but it’s well known by now that YouTube is a critical part of a musician’s promotional arsenal, and there is SOME possibility of revenue from YouTube advertising.  Not to mention that pictures and video clips are a huge value-add for websites and other promotional material.  Heck, you might as well shoot your next 8×10 glossy with a cool mix desk background while you wait for the engineer to set up mics. 

Surround 

I’d be remiss not to mention surround sound.  It would be false to claim that surround mixes are a necessary part of a production’s deliverables, because for the most part they’re not asked for, and there’s virtually no consumer market, but if you happen to be in a studio that has the capability, doing another “save as” and creating a 5.1 version of a mix could be a cool addition to what you offer.  I highly recommend starting with the finished stereo mix and enhancing from there (although one could argue other methods), since you want to create the same basic musical experience.  Especially if you’re going after movies, 5.1 versions could be valuable. But do consider your potential cost/benefit ratio before doing surround. 

Documentation and project files 

Last but not least, never leave the studio without copies of ALL your project files, raw tracks and any notes or documentation.  Copy the folder the DAW project is in, and make notes of the software version, hardware, and especially the plugins used.  You need this material in your hands, not just stored at the studio.  You never know if the studio will lose your stuff, or if you may be halfway around the world needing to fix something at the last minute. Unless it’s owned by a label (in which case this advice is for them), you put yourself in a much better place by keeping your material on hand. 

Hopefully now you can see how much more value you can pull from your studio time.  If you’re efficient, it won’t cost much more to get everything you need.  Then your living needn’t be tied to your fame, and that, in my humble opinion, is a huge relief!  Happy monetizing! 

SIDEBAR: Separations 

Since I work in various DAWs, I’m a huge fan of separations.  I leave the studio with full separations of a mix, so I can call it up and deliver breakdowns or alternate edits at will in any software, without going to the studio.  I also sometimes send full separations to the mastering engineer, so he has better control. 

Full separations means every track is separated; kick, snare, guitar, vocal, etc.  These tracks can import into a DAW, set at zero with no processing, and the mix sounds exactly like the finished stereo mix.  It’s easy to mute a few tracks and create a breakdown, or edit an new version.  You can also take the separations to a totally different studio to do surround versions later. 

With separations, even if you don’t have the same rig as the studio, you can do breakdowns and re-edits to your heart’s content without having to go back.  This is a great way to be able to quickly deliver what’s needed to a client without having to own a full-fledged studio yourself. 

Exporting full separations, however, can be a long process.  Some software (and tape) can only mix-down in real-time, which means you have to mute all but one track and mix-down over and over to achieve full separations.  24 tracks equals 24 passes, which for a 3 minute song is 72 minutes – over an hour of studio time.  Also, if you’ve got processing like EQ or compression on the final stereo buss, running just one track through that processing will hit differently than the whole mix, so your final set of separations may not be what you thought.  Some software like Sonar allow you to export all busses at once, so strategic buss assignment can speed things up, but you still need to be careful about overall processing. 

So, proceed with caution, but consider the value of getting separations, or the alternative: get your own copy of the software and plugins in your favorite studio, so you can call up projects as is and deliver new edits.  You don’t need the whole studio to do this, only the same software. 

Your Music Isn’t Special
July 28, 2016 by Aaron
aaron trumm, art, art business, business, music, music business, music money, nquit music, rock, rock music, special, success, unique

Your music isn’t special!

Oh no! I always hated that saying. People will say it all the time, either when they’re trying to get you to have less ego, or they’re trying to convince you to give up the pipe dream, or whatever. But MOST of the time when you hear that is when you’re learning the real ins and outs of music marketing and business. Straight forward business minded people in music will tell you that right away.

It’s mostly to let you know that you can’t just sit around thinking your some kind of genius and expect anybody to respond to that. It’s weird, egoistic, and most of all, doesn’t work. It was always a bit depressing to me but recently I got a very new take on it in my head.

Now I think that’s very GOOD news. At least the concept of it…see I feel like it’s a relief not to have to make every song some epic world changing thing that will certainly go viral. Going viral is like winning the lottery – quite unlikely. And it’s actually MORE depressing to me to think of pinning my hopes and dreams on something that unlikely.

So, it’s really a good thing to realize, it’s not really the music that makes the success. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t want to suck, and the music is really moving and makes a difference, but success in any business is about relationships. Yes you start with a great product, but you don’t have to worry so much about your product being somehow better than everyone else’s, or when you go on stage being super competitive about standing out or making sure every time you sing a song, it’s this insane transcendent experience for everyone in the room and people are like “holy fuck what did I just SEE??”

That’s crap. That’s the surface facing internet culture and our American tendency to go for the icing and not the cake that tells us that every little thing has to be “special” and everything worth consuming has to be world shattering and like nothing ever seen before. That’s an overwhelming thought because it’s impossible. A song is 3 minutes. There are rules you follow, no matter how avant-garde you are, and there’s really only so much one tune can do. Sure, it moves people, sure there may be transcendence. Sure, you can do a concert that just takes people away, or a video that’s just wildly powerful or moving – but that will never be that special in the grand scheme of things. There’s always that stuff. There’s 7 billion creative people on the planet and there’s no end to the powerful, moving, transcendent material out there.

Part of the clickbait strategy is to sell every damn page or video as some kind of crazy amazing hugely weird thing – headline formulas include “you won’t believe what this guy did..” and whatnot..and you do see a lot of “wow!” – 7 year olds playing drums, dude jumping off buildings, whatever. But who cares? No matter how amazing you are, you’re not the only one.

So trying to be special is weird and overwhelming and it’s really not effective because the more you act like you’re special, the more you alienate people. Really, to succeed as an artist is about building a network of like-minded folk, collaborating, and putting your mark out there. No one can do what you do and in that sense YOU are special. But you don’t really need your music to be special, and you certainly need to understand that it won’t be perceived as all that special for the most part. But you can still build a business, and a fanbase, and take your place among the other badass artists that you have something in common with. And that actually will be enough, in fact, it’s even enough to build to rock star status and become famous.

So yeah – your music isn’t special – that’s not because you suck – it’s because music is small – powerful, but small, and everybody does it – so your music isn’t special. And it doesn’t need to be, because YOU are. So you can relax 🙂

— A

Hey – it may not be special, but I think some of my stuff rocks and maybe you will too – easy to find out by getting some for FREE at aarontrumm.com – LOVE!

Keeping it going…
June 22, 2015 by Aaron
aaron trumm, development, free music, nquit music, programming, toptal, toptal test


I’ve very rarely held down a 9-5 job. When I was a touring performer, it was simply impossible. But sometimes being on the road or at home in the studio doesn’t lead to enough money to sustain or grow. Sometimes it does, but it can be stressful to have to monetize every creative impulse.

So, for most of the 20 years I’ve been running NQuit Music, I’ve also been a freelancer. It makes perfect sense to sell the skillset I’ve been building working to build the dream of NQuit. It also makes sense that the most lucrative of those skills is software and web development. NQuit was one of the first labels to have an internet presence, starting when it was hosted at UNM as unm.edu/~murphurd. Over the years I’ve used NQuit as a platform for building a formidable development skillset, not only by doing projects for NQuit, but also by using that same business structure to hire myself out. Of course I’ve done plenty of audio and such, but the great thing about web dev is as long as I’ve got my laptop (now I actually use a PC-Powerful tablet), I can be on the road (or at a park or the zoo) and still work. It’s good to have this flexibility!

I used to rely on word of mouth and Craigslist searches, but those methods tend to dry up at times, and Craigslist has become overrun with scams and bad clients (clients who won’t pay, who don’t understand the value of the work, or who make helping them impossible). I started to grow very tired of small time, disorganized clientele a few years ago, so recently I thought I’d check out some freelancing sites like upwork.com, elance.com and freelance.com (among others). There’s still some small clients, but so far it seems promising.

Now I discovered an exclusive platform called Toptal, which has a thing called the Toptal PHP Freelancers Group and this seems extra promising. I’ve already noticed through upwork that this new environment causes me to try to deepen my knowledge and organize my pitch and portfolio better, so that’s a good thing, and it’s exciting to think I could find a platform that will really lead me to solid clients, and maybe even to some cool projects.

So, I’ll be getting all competitive about getting in with Toptal, and hopefully income can stabilize. Wish me luck!

**EDIT** Holy crap that was lame and hard but – since then I’ve learned some things. And I just want to say, grab some free music from me, ’cause that’s what I’m really doing dude: HERE aarontrumm.com

The Underground
September 3, 2013 by Aaron
aaron trumm, artistic development, battle, blue dragon, free music, helios, nquit music, nuyroican, performer, poetry, slam poetry, spoken word, underground


I wanted to think about something. The roots of everything pretty are underground. I said this 8 or so years ago on my 2nd CD:

…deep underneath that crust of the earth
are animals that really have some girth to their worth
you’re growin up the flowers of commercialization
forever will the roots remain UNDER the nation…

This speaks the legitimacy of the underground.

But what of the underground? How long can a seed stay under the soil? Is it not the seed’s destiny to grow into a mighty oak or a beautimous bloom?

I could easily quote Howl now and make my point – I’ve seen the best minds of my generation – blah blah blah. Which is to say, we, the counter culture, we, the underground, are destroying ourselves. Sure, I imagine there are some that shall and should always be under, down, deep deep deep, feeding the rest, and some that never know the power of the earth, and that never realize that who THEY are, what THEY see, what THEY know to be “normal”, is always and necessarily the child of the underground.

The seed becomes the seed first, then it becomes the oak. Not the other way around. These places here, the Helios bar in Houston, the Nuyorican Cafe in New York, the Blue Dragon in Albuquerque, these are the places where we come from, where we cut our teeth, and where we owe our undying allegiance.

But a man child doesn’t stay at home with mommy when there’s a battle to be fought. Disregarding for a moment my notion that battle may not be the answer, I would say to those of us with fire in our bones, why are we still here, cowering in the underground, smoking weed and methamphetemines, drinking ourselves into obvlivion, when so many of us have grown into might oaken warriors and have always known it is our task to take these amazing new things that were born in the underground out into the overground and into the sky?

Why, if we are unsatisfied with our leaders in government, are we not running for offices? Why, if we are unsatisfied with our pop icons and movie stars, are we not replacing them?

We spend far too much time speaking harsh words against our brothers in the sky, when in truth, they are merely humans like us, only they have chosen to sprout. Sure, too many of them have sprouted, forgotten where they come from, and begun to choke the very nutrients out from under themselves. No, I do not think it is alright for George W. Bush to run around smiling and laughing taking golf vacations when some of us have three jobs and 11 grand of debt, and still others are begging for change under bridges. No, I am not surprised. This has always been the way it is. It’s not even necessarily wrong. But TOO MANY people are disatisfied and DOING NOTHING.

I’m not a politician. I’m an artist. I’m a performer. So what should I do? I was reminded last night of the concept of my circle of influence. Yes. I shall operate within my circle of influence. I shall perform. I shall create. And when someone who has been languishing underground for 2 or 5 or 15 years, a choking struggling oak tree pretending to be a seed, I will hand that mother fucker a shrink wrapped package with his name on it.

This is what I can do. Next, I will do more.

I’m not going to Baghdad to do nothing for no one. I’m not going to Taos to hide in the fucking mountains like a coward. I’m not going to hole up in Thailand making records, as if making random recordings for no one to hear had anything to do with anything. I’ll see you in L.A., the fray, New York, Washington, Houston, London. I’ll see you on the streets of Bangkok or on the front page of the Times. I’ll see you on Jay Leno and Windows Media Player. I’ll see you in the Helios throwing bags of cocaine into the street. I’ll see you SOMEWHERE, is the point.

Now I say, here’s the test, here’s where most people fail, where G.W. is failing, where Capital Records is failing, where all of us at the Helios are failing: Is this about me? Is this is a contest? Will I be preaching to the democrats and left wing whiskey drinking poets to stand up, fight for yourself, and win the battle? Fuck ’em all? You’re nothin if you don’t take care of number one? Wouldn’t I just be a conservative then? When will I flip over and become what I hate? Do I have to? Or can I dig myself out from under the earth, fly into the big pretty clouds and BACK again, and never become bitter, mean, cold and heartless? I’ve proven to all that I can win a damn contest. You don’t believe me, come throw a punch at me, see what happens. But what is the POINT of that? What is the point of being ALONE on Mount Olympus? I’m not here to take everyone out, for God’s sake. That would just be BORING.

This week I will be handing one of those packages out to somebody that said three times last night, “I will battle compassionate conservatism with compassion.”

Understand what that package is, my man. That’s the dirt coming off. That’s the seed pushing through the thawing ground, that’s the oak, that’s the bloom. Could be a new nation or a simple CD. Still an oak, still a bloom, still worth showing someone sometime.

See you in the fray.

Speaking of the fray – go get some free music from me before I change my mind! CLICK HERE FOR THAT.

Demon
March 11, 2009 by Aaron
aaron trumm, bugs wine demons, david bowie, demon, dominguez, eric anthamatten, music industry, nquit music, productivity, prolific, semper Thou


[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.nquit.com/sounds/semperThou/BugsWineDemons/06semperThouDemon.mp3″]Demon, by semper Thou

aaronnats1

Officially the most depressing song on the face of the planet in history. When we got done with the mix on this one, Eric wanted a CD copy. He was going to buy a CD player and a really nice set of headphones, put this in the player, and put the package on the chick’s doorstep. I said no. No, sir, no. We gotta look out for each other!

I write and write in this blog for a couple of days and then I get burnt out on it. Especially if I have any kind of shift of conciousness that makes me step away from thinking about this stuff. I’ve had a few of these conversations wherein someone suggests that perhaps moving forward I should do something like being a personal trainer. Don’t know if I’ll do exactly that, but the thought can give me such relief that I briefly no longer care about railing on about music industry stuff.

Anyway that spurting inspiration (*snicker*) is another big thing when you’re trying to run a business in art. Good business is based on steady, predictable production, not spurting inspiration. One thing you can do is, if you’re prolific enough during your inspired times, you can create a backlog of work that you can slowly release over time in the business side of things. You just have to make sure what you’re doing will stay relevant. Stuff that’s really really current might become worthless quickly.

That’s another reason why performing live is crucial. Recordings and new songs come in spurts, but you can be on stage steadily every day in a more consistent manner than you can write new songs in a consistent manner (bullshit if you’re reading this and saying you can write a song every day from here on out, BULLSHIT – you WILL have down time and you BETTER be prepared). The key though is you can’t be all persnickidy about fresh material on stage, you have to be willing to play something a million times. Have the freshness be in each different experience, each day being different than the last, but also the satisfaction being in the wisdom of knowing that we are ever repeating, life is ever repeating, and that, if you think about it, that’s all of our goals, rather than this neo-christian-british-glory notion of “getting somewhere” we actually just hope to carry on. Endlessly repeating and repeating. If you can keep that in mind, keep in your heart a feeling of just BEING, this just IS what you are and you’re not going anywhere, you’re just living life, then you can keep performing and performing and performing.

But the problem is, when was that the attitude? Maybe if you’re David Bowie, you’re thinking you’re just maintaining and living. But if you’re an indie, you’re trying to get to being David Bowie. That constant mission and trying to become something you are currently not is ironically the biggest killer in getting somewhere because being consistent is the key to growing a business, including a musical one. You have to consistently show up for a fan base that slowly but surely grows and grows and grows.

Somebody like me tends to periodically, consistently, find the inconsistent and break down completely and reinvent. Somebody like Eric too. First being dominguez, then being semper Thou, then being Hericlitus. This is partly about being poisoned by the neo-christian-british-manifest-destiny-glory-trip but it’s also partly about being on a path of growth and creation, which means constant change. The irony is that some of the most creative and vibrant artists are that because of this nature of constant upheaval and change, and thus they’re the ones that never get anywhere.

So maybe it’s not entirely the fucked upness of the industry, but the nature of the beast itself. I’m sure there are plenty that would say that’s fine, because the point of the art is not to make money or be famous.

So all that may be why so much of what you hear that becomes “popular” is so boring and lifeless. And why there are so many things that a LOT of people know about, but most of those people don’t actually like it, and the whole boring perpetuation comes. Of course there are examples of people that break down and reinvent and make that be their strength. Madonna comes to mind. That woman reinvents her “image” every time she does an album.

But there are obviously some very crucial keys that DO NOT CHANGE with Madonna. That foundation allows her to change what doesn’t matter – her hair, her clothes. These are not the things that people latch on to. Her name, for example, cannot change. She, like any of us, would be dealt a great setback were she to decide the name needed to change. In fact that’s the number one thing, even more than the style of music. But her music, although changing much, adheres to a few basic principles, staying within a certain genre/category. She also changes ALONG WITH that genre, rather than counter to it, so she actually maintains a much more consistent connection than if her music were to remain actually static. She follows the trends, as it were.

Whether or not in her personal life she reinvents to any large degree I wouldn’t know. But you can tell that it’s happened some. Her lyrics went from bubble gum Cyndi Lauper style (that definition was vaguely recursive wasn’t it?) to sexual sex shock style to all this Om shanti shanti stuff but the progression was natural and again, she left it within the bounds of the genre. Another thing to note is, she may have reinvented her personal self to some degree, but not to the intense degree I seem to be, for example. IE: she may have changed, but she didn’t ever stop making music or think “hmm I think I’ll retire and become a personal trainer” – well maybe she thought that, but it didn’t happen.

Of course comparing her path to mine is a ridiculous thing to do, because she started out on major labels. Even if she had had times of complete seperation from it, the business of selling her music and her image was never going to stop. We would have kept seeing the imagery even if the actual Madonna human had disappeared entirely.

Hmmm. Maybe that’s the whole reason to not run the label your music is on. Maybe MOST artists disappear like I tend to. But their label carries on. The public never knows. Lest we forget, what you see on the TV is a ghost, a spook, an illusion of light and sound, it is LITERALLY only just the surface, and not the person.

Ok – edit – 2016 – Eric’s old record is somewhere in the ether, waiting for him to resign contracts… I’m focusing on me and that productivity I mentioned. So to that end, CLICK HERE to get FREE MUSIC from my latest efforts…

You Can Never Stop Us
September 18, 2008 by Aaron
aaron trumm, classical, fusion, monkey set, poetry, spoken, techno, third option, trance, word, you can never stop us


You Can Never Stop Us, by Third Option

Oh wow I almost forgot about this one. The thing that I like about this one, actually, is how there’s this group of dudes (multiple version of me of course) saying “you can never stop us” real fast and for most of the time, it just sounds like rhythm instruments, but then at times I notice “oh yeah those are dudes saying you can never stop us!” That’s neat 🙂

There’s really a mixed message in this piece of poem. It’s interesting, because I do that a lot, but I think that makes a more accurate representation of “truth”. “Truth” isn’t this black and white thing where you can take one position. I’ve always said (not always – but a long time) that “truth is a mobius” – meaning that if you take a “position” on something, and follow the train of logic long enough, you’ll find yourself saying the opposite of what you started saying. I think this is part of the fundamental nature of things, where reality is paradoxical – and we do find that most of the greatest truths ARE very paradoxical. Committment-Non-Attachment is one of the major ones.

When it comes to this poem, there isn’t really a paradox as much as a double-edged sword. I was ranting about the wonderfulness of monkeys (monkeys still of course being a very thinly veiled metaphor for humanity) and I say how we dance on the corpse of impossibleness and it seems that this is good news to me, and I like it, and I want it. And then I say how we will adapt, and that still seems to be good news, but then in the next line I say “too dry, monkey? casinos with water fountains every 30 feet” and at that point it no longer seems like good news. Now I’m saying this is ridiculous, we’re not accepting, in effect, we’re NOT adapting, we’re forcing the environment to adapt, we’re trying to put water where there is not water.

And that does sort of emphasize again the mobius nature of truth and reality. We start out with adapting, take it too far, and come out not adapting. Doing the very opposite. And well, I guess I just become another person pointing out that there can be too much of a good thing, that anything taken too far is too much.

I guess that’s why some wise people say “everything in moderation, even moderation.”

The “lyrics” in question:

allow me to introduce myself
i’m the tallest monkey in the clouds
and you can never stop us
because monkeys know just what to do
where to do it
and how

monkeys know just how to howl at the moon
like wolves could never do
you can never stop us
we’ll run to the edges of earth
and when 100 of us know
the rest of know

and when the rest of us follow the edges of the san francisco trolly of the beat
monkeys help dance on the corpse of impossibleness

until the fattest monkey of them all transforms
right here in the desert
monkey wants to make a killing in the arizona sun
too hot, monkey?
we’ll adapt
too dry, monkey?
casinos with water fountains every 30 feet
monkeys
monkeys
show us your true colors

trapped at the edges of the world rolling dough

you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us
you can never stop us

Even if you want to stop us ;), there’s still free stuff at thirdoptionmusic.com 🙂

– Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1318″ text=”Download The Monkey Set Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

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Run
September 17, 2008 by Aaron
aaron trumm, monkey set, music, run, spoken word, techno/classical/poetry fusion, third option


Run, by Third Option

Pretty sure I improv’d this whole piece of poem here to tape. I remember a few days later I did an improv based on this – or – wait – it could be – yes I think it is – I think it’s reversed. What really happened was I did an improv with this refrain “run out the door we don’t need no more plastic floors” at a youth/teen slam in Spring, TX which I was hosting. We had a little round of doing improv and they all wanted me to try, and something like this is what I said. I didn’t say monkeys, but I did use that run out the door thing. I remember that I did it much better at the slam, actually. I remember I kind of starting taking off and getting into this socio political shit about 7up bottles and plastic floors and it was really powerful and people were like “WOW! DAMN! AMAZING! HOLY SHIT!” and such.

Yeah, and then this time, I didn’t quite get the same badassness as at the slam, but I got somethin. 🙂

That reminds me of this one guy who used to slam around the nation. His name was Abraham and he was from the south somewhere. He had a really sort of huck finn/way spiritual vibe – not straight essay style easy to understand spoken word like they do in slam nowadays, but poetry stuff, but he’d really go off. And he was an amazing improv person. I saw him improv at the Taos Poetry Circus slam and the thing about him was, his improv, the stuff that just came to mind for him, was the same as his written poetry. He just thought and talked like that. I mean I guess he didn’t talk like that if you sat at coffee with him, but when he improv’d it was no less poetic and crafted and beautiful. He could probably improv and you wouldn’t be able to tell. But not like guys who write as if they were talking or writing a prose essay. Like a POET, which was really weird and amazing to watch. He would just launch into this spiritual flight immedietly. I really tried to take him into me and have his thing become a part of my style. He was fuckin amazing. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Anyway here’s what’s on the record as far as poem for “Run”:


run
run
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run
run
out the door
where the tree lined skies begin again
run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
run out the door
run out the cage
run out the stage
run off the stage
run off this stage of monkey lies and monkey things
and monkey things we must not do run
out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we got dirt
we got soil
we got the red wet earth
run out the door
run out the door
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more plastic floors
monkeys
belong
in trees
in jungles
in the earth
on the earth
on the red wet earth
we don’t need no more plastic floors
we don’t need no more
plastic floors

We don’t need plastic floors, but we DO need FREE STUFF! GET IT! 🙂

[purchase_link id=”1318″ text=”Download The Monkey Set Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

iTunes US

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