tablets, loudess and Ke$ha

oh man. apple is coming out with a new tablet computer. well, at least that's the rumor. all i know is that thing better mow the lawn or something cool cause between my iphone and laptop i'm not sure why i'd need one. but apple has a good track record of not only coming up with gadgets that we need, but new stuff that we didn't even know we needed....and i use the word need very loosely. i mean seriously, is it necessary that i check my facebook 12,390 times a day?

i've been thinking a lot lately about mixing. for those of you who don't follow the audio world, there's been a battle raging for about the last 15 years called the Loudness War. to make a long story short, every band out there wants their record to be louder than the other guys. but there's a ceiling on a CD of how loud it can be. so the only way to make it seem louder is to compress the snot out of a song. compressing evens out the peaks and valleys so that the loud parts are quieter and the soft parts are louder. on first listen, a louder song may seem better, but it's not. it fatigues the ear and takes away a lot of the energy in the song.

to check out more on the issue, go to youtube and just search "loudness wars" and there's plenty of video/audio examples. Here's one:



Anyway, i did a lot of mixing in the last half of 2009 and the more i think about it, the more the loudness war seems ridiculous. i know how to get a bands' track loud. it's not that hard. but what is hard is knowingly degrading the sound that i worked so hard to achieve. what is also frustrating is that the bands respond to it even when they know nothing about it. i've sent mixes back to a band when they couldn't quite say what they didn't like about it. but as soon as i smash it and compress it they LOVE it. although that's probably partly due to the fact that it's loud rock music. i imagine that if i mixed a three piece jazz outfit then it might be different.....emphasis on the MIGHT. i'd absolutely love to work with a band that would have the courage to let their record be a little softer than the others yet pack a crisp dynamic that doesn't make your ears tired when you turn it up. a band that wouldn't mind if the listener just turned the volume up a little more to really experience the dynamics. whenever i mix a project now the first thing i ask is if it's going to be mastered by anyone. if it is, then the burden of compressing it and making it loud is on them. i mix without bus compression and even though you can drive a mix a little into the red without distorting, i give the mastering guy plenty of headroom to work with. but i'll be honest. it's scary. maybe they'll never use me again or tell their friends' bands that i suck at mixing because i didn't make it loud enough. blah.

ok, on another random note, there's this girl:



if you aren't living under a rock, you've probably heard her song Tik Tok all over top forty radio. what's crazy is that she used to live in nashville. many of my friends and i used to see her all around town. she was just kesha. i knew she was trying to do music, but what the heck, everybody in nashville is. and she never played any shows. then she moves out to LA and a couple years later all of the sudden she's huge. what the heck. i dug through my old archives and found this:


click to enlarge

this was taken at my old apartment at birthday party for ben harms, current bassist for the glorious unseen and lifelong friend of mine. we made fliers with his face on it and called it the Guy-apalooza because everyone called him the GUY back then and we were copying Mitch-apalooza from the movie Old School. there are two things that are funny about this. the first is that all my friends look so young. the second is the fact that the girl in the background all the way to the left is Kesha back when she used to dress like a hippie before she became a pop sensation.

anyway if any of the girls happen to see this photo, i hope you enjoy. haha....ok i'm going to bed.

here's a few tips

i turned 29 last friday. that's right. my birthday is on christmas. i'm really getting up there in age. i mean, that's practically 30. i've realized that since i'm so old now, that must mean that i'm very wise. so this old sage has prepared a few tips on life in general that i've come across in the last year for all you kids out there. enjoy.

1. if you drop your iphone in the toilet, put it in a ziplock baggie with rice. it works. trust me, i learned the hard way. and if some of you were wondering why my iphone was with me in the bathroom, let me say that Words With Friends, The Deep Pinball and this Euchre app i found are ruining my life.

2. guys, when your wife asks you how she looks, or if this dress looks good or any other question dealing with how she looks, RUN. it's a trap!



3. if you plan on swinging your guitar around your neck, maybe sure your straplocks are on good and tight. technically, this was a little longer than a year ago. if any of you have seen our live show, sometimes i like to throw my guitar around my neck. well,the last show on the creation tour a year ago i didn't have my straplocks on correctly and when i swung my guitar, the strap came off and it went flying off the stage and almost hit a security guard. on a related note, ask me if you ever need a guitar repair guy in nashville. ed beaver is amazing.

4. stay away from credit cards. credit cards are like a christian and alcohol. technically, it's not wrong for a christian to drink as long as he doesn't go overboard. but it's soooo easy to. many of you are responsible enough to handle credit cards, but many are not. just stay away. this last year my wife and i paid them off thanks to the dave ramsey plan and we're definitely happy to be done with it.

5. don't cross the streams.

6. enjoy spicy food while you can because it won't last forever

7. i'm sooooo over IKEA. sure, their stuff looks cool and it's not expensive....but another word for not expensive is cheap. and that's what it is. cheaply made crap that won't last longer than the semester you will use it for in college before you realize a good piece of furniture costs more than $60.

8. pedaltrain pedalboards and cases. amazing. if you're a guitarist that travels, just save yourself a lot of pedalboard headaches and get a pedaltrain. and i'm not sponsored by them.

9. many of us have a natural knee jerk reaction that we are only interested in things or hobbies that we discover. get over this. if someone tries to show you some thing they think is cool, LISTEN to them. they're probably right. and think about this, if someone is taking the time to try to make your life better and tell you about something awesome, how much of a slap in the face is it if you instantly write them off purely because you didn't discover it yourself?

10. write a blog. it's fun and when you go back and read old posts it's actually kinda cool to remember where your head was at a year ago.

ok, that's enough for now. talk to you later

hindsight

the guy who i worked under and mentored me at Chicago Recording Company for seven years died just over a year ago. You can read the obit here.

as much as he verbally abused me and the other assistants, at times he treated us very well. he was estranged from his family and didn't really have any real friends so he kind of thought of us as family. on christmas' or birthdays (which are the same day in my case), he would get us lavish presents. he bought me a computer one year. i didn't make much money and it was hard to buy a gift for someone who had lots of it. but he always acted grateful when he opened our presents to him even if it was a terrible gift that required no thought.

for some reason tonight i googled his name and came across his amazon.com wishlist. there are many tim butler's, but this list HAD to be his. of all the crappy gifts i got him, and full well knowing he used amazon like crazy, i never once thought to search for his wishlist. here's a link to his list consisting of 22 pages and 541 items. most of which are books under $20. i feel like a jerk.

potato skins

friday i stepped off the plane into a city much colder than nashville. detroit rock city to be exact. while waiting for my baggage i was enticed the candy machine next to the carousel. here is what i saw:

yes, you CAN believe your eyes. those are two delicious bags of friday's potato skins dangling precariously from their perch. and by the way, when i said delicious, i really mean disgusting. i've been to Friday's. i've had their potato skins. i don't know where these people get their potato skins, but they are definitely NOT the tasty appetizer. heck, it doesn't even have bits of bacon in it. too bad for the suckers who dropped a few quarters in the slot looking for something to fill their stomachs and clog their arteries. actually, what would really be funny is if it was one dude who got suckered twice. hopefully whoever it was didn't suffer from depression because bad luck like this may have been the straw that broke the camels back and caused them graduate from depressed to full-fledged suicidal. actually, it reminds me of those little quarter machines at carnivals. you know, the ones that look like this:



you know how these work. the quarters perched on the edge just waiting for the tiniest of nudges to push them over and into your hands. but that never happens. a single quarter pushed into the crowd is displaced evenly and thus instead of pushing the coins forward a distance equal to that of a quarter, it barely moves at all. well, i almost fished out a dollar bill. i

anyway, i was very tempted. but i could almost hear admiral akbar in my head:



i told myself, what the heck, three bags of potato skins for the price of one. but then i realized that even if i did get all three, i wouldn't exactly be "winning" at life, would i?

oh, and speaking of aeroplanes and aeroports, when a pilot announces their "equipment is still showing that some people's cell phones are still turned on", you can rest assured that they are full of crap. is it possible to have some sort of instrument that detects cell phone radio waves? sure. is there a way you could distinguish between those signals a few feet away in the plane and those a few feet away at gate? nope. empty threats, captain. let's face it. you and i both know cell phones don't affect your equipment.

and there's one more thing i have to rant about. while waiting at my gate i was watching CNN on the big tv. they were doing a report on a guy who had gotten help from the federal loan restructuring plan and what's a great job the government was doing. they said that his current mortgage payment was 95% of his monthly income. then later in the report he said that he walked into the building having to pay $4,700 a month and walked out only having to pay $2400. wow. that's a big difference. this is such a success. but something didn't seem right. so i got out my phone calculator and did the math. if $4,700 is 95% of his monthly income, that means that he makes $5,000 a month ($4,947.37 to be exact). so he makes roughly $60,000 a year. the new payment of $2,400 a month is still almost 50% of his income. anybody out there listening to dave ramsey knows that a house payment more than 1/4 or 1/3 of your income will be a strain. so basically this guy, even with his new restructured loan still has a house that he can't and never could afford. why is this seen as a success?

anyway, that night we played a show for 89x at the Fillmore. the place is an awesome theater and it was packed. flyleaf and thirty seconds to mars were also on the bill. this show felt different because it was for a general market radio station. there were plenty of expletives being dropped from the stage that night. what impressed me about the whole thing was flyleaf. i've never seen them before. what impressed me wasn't how they played, but their conduct. nobody told us to dumb down our message, but even i could feel an unspoken pressure to not talk about jesus. right before flyleaf played "All Around Me", lacey said unapologetically, "this is a song about jesus." later on in the set they played the popular worship song "How He Loves". i was definitely surprised.

anyway, here's a shot of the crowd:

thirty seconds to mars was awesome. i think jared leto is better making music than he is at making movies. ok, well i'm watching movies at home with my wife and my chicken nuggets are done so i'd better go. what better way to end a blog dominated by an anti-potato skin diatribe than to finish it off with the pseudo-meat we can chicken nuggets??

studio time

ok so remember when trev and i were on the price is right a month or so ago??? well it finally aired on 12/11/09. you can view the entire episode by clicking HERE

Matt from Tooth and Nail actually got called up and won a new car. it was the most ridiculously awesome experience i've had in a long time. sometimes you just have to experience something even if it's cheesy. for instance, when you go to hollywood, you put your hands in the famous handprints at the chinese theater. when you go to chicago, you eat deep dish pizza, and when your buddy gets called up as a contestant on the price is right, you make a complete idiot of yourself to get as much camera time as possible. and proudly, that's what i did. this episode is for you, America. your welcome.

Back To The Ole Grind



today i'm in the studio with my good friends steve wilson and david, seth and lee marie from Children 18:3 working on their next record. steve is an awesome producer and he asked me to help out a bit. Here's a shot of the trident series 80 desk. we're in the B room at Darkhorse Recording in Franklin, TN which is actually the better sounding drum room than the A room, surprisingly.



Here's steve being unwittingly photographed messing with the flux capacitor. but seriously those are vintech x81's and i covet them with all my heart. ok i don't covet them. i'm just going to have a hard time leaving the studio without them hidden under my coat. oh, and that white piece of gear is the Amek 9098 stereo compressor and we had some good results when we placed the room mics in the adjoining vocal booth and compressed the snot out of them with it.



And here's the actual drum setup. it's actually a hodge podge mix of a few different kits. notice the gretsch resonant kick, accent snare and of course, there's a cowbell in there somewhere. but i think i need to hear more of it...ok, call me captain obvious because that was a really obvious joke.

tomorrow i fly to detroit where TFK will play a show with Thirty Seconds To Mars and a few other bands. i'm kinda pumped about it. i hope you are all doing well and i'll holla atcha later.

US vs. The World

sometimes i have to write when a subject is fresh in my mind. right now i'm in Recklinghausen, Germany and i'm having trouble sleeping because of jet lag. but that's not what's on my mind.

it's no secret that many people in europe and the world are at odds with the US. and that's ok. but what gets me is how supposed "news" organizations present the news as unbiased and whether overtly or inadvertently, that bias is shaping opinion.



i had been following the whole "climate-gate" crisis back in the states before i left. for those of you who live under a rock, a few emails were leaked from the leading climate scientists where they discuss how they fixed the raw data to support their cause for global warming. anyway, at the time only fox news was carrying the story - and let me say that fox news is no angel. they are not very fair and balanced. but anyway, in the past few days the story has grown legs and the networks could no longer afford to ignore it. when jon stewart reported on it, they had to cover it.

over here in germany i've been watching the only english speaking channels available which are CNN World and BBC World. what has been interesting is the discrepancies between the US coverage and the world coverage. fox news has been gloating about this. why are they gloating? because it's right. it proves their point and casts doubts into what many are now seeing as junk science. on the other hand, when the world news reports on it, they focus on the fact that the emails were "stolen" or "hacked" without even addressing the fact that what's in the emails are damning. it's like a guy demonizing his girlfriend because she found out he was cheating by checking his cell phone texts. ya, it's wrong, but the actual deed far exceeds the method of acquisition. the world news networks go on with sound bites from 5 or 6 proponents of climate legislation and two lines from a solitary skeptic. the whole newcast comes off as an annoyance and clearly shows any neanderthal who is watching what the "correct" viewpoint is. the devil is in the details. and they are very clever with the details. for instance, even if the report itself is completely unbiased, sometimes the mere fact that they are reporting it shows bias. if i were to claim that i could fly and the news started doing reports where they ask rhetorical questions like "can this guy really fly?" "is there truth to his story?" the fact that they are talking about it over and over gives credence to the issue. and guess what has been the number one report that has been replayed over and over the past 4 days? the climate change summit in copenhagen. christiana amonpour just did a promo saying "the summit is being hijacked by skeptics, but can they put a dent in the science?" hmmm...i wonder where she stands on the issue. she attacked the issue from two sides. first she vilifies the skeptics for the audacity of requiring scientific evidence and for "hijacking" the summit. and also by asking if they can "put a dent" in the science is subtly telling you that even if it's true, it's not very substantial. notice how she very slyly minimizes and undermines what is actually a clear contradiction to the holy writ of climate propaganda.

so you can obviously see my bias on the issue (at least i'm not trying to hide it). but just to be clear, here's what i think. is ice melting and has the climate gotten slightly warmer? yes. did we have anything to do with it? WE DON'T KNOW. is it a good idea to make efforts to lower emissions? yes, i'm seriously considering installing a solar cell system in my house to save energy and money. but should we make new restrictive and far-reaching laws when the basic premise of said legislation has yet to be settled? absolutely not.

many people claim that the advent of the industrial revolution coincides with the start of the warming trend. but if you look at the data, the warming started before then. there was also a period where the earth warmed in the 1500's and then cooled down. there's also evidence that the earth has natural warming and cooling periods that we can't control. are we causing it? maybe. i'll admit the notion is possible. but we truly do not know. it's like the beginning of shawshank redemption where tim robbins has mountains of circumstantial evidence to convict him even though he isn't guilty. just because certain evidence points one direction, you cannot jump to conclusions before you have all the evidence. cause if you do then the climate will hide under a Rita Hayworth poster and dig its' way out and send evidence of our corruption to the paper and we will have no choice but to shoot ourselves in the face like the warden. ok, maybe i'm stretching that metaphor. it's just that it's probably the best ending to a movie ever. (take that, M. Night Shyamalan!).


Tim Robbins: new lows in stretching metaphors

so anyway, don't believe everything you see on TV.

happy thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving weekend. trish and i just got back from my parents house in illinois. it was great to see my family. the highlight of the weekend was shooting skeet [insert dirty joke here] at my aunts house. i should mention my aunt kathy because she told me she reads the blog so this is my shout out. anyway, i don't think i'd qualify for gun toting redneck, but holding a shiny hand canon and shootin' some lead at a little piece of clay is pretty fun. if you haven't had a chance to try it, i'd definitely recommend it. the gun in the picture is a remington 870 wingmaster that is about 50 years old. it was my grandfathers gun and now my uncle has it. the gun still shoots like a champ and by the way, my grandpa was pretty gnarley. i heard stories this weekend about him apparently going hunting without a gun by letting his dog chase a rabbit into an old car which he would then reach into, grab the rabbit, snap its neck and have a tasty snack. don't believe me? my dad swears by it.


Anyway, i had a chance to write a few open letters:

Dear Cracker Barrel:
please add some more merchandise displays to your waiting area. i'm still able to breathe a bit

Dear people driving by the accident on I-24 near Hopkinsville, KY:
just because a car is wrecked on the side of the road doesn't mean you need to slow down to a crawl and gape at it

Dear retailers of america:
kudos to you for creating a day where people camp outside your doors in the cold for the chance to give you money and impulse buy things they don't want or need just because they're on sale

Dear Strike and Spare Bowling Alley in Springfield, IL:
$4.50 a game isn't bad, but what's with the $4.00 for shoe rental? those smelly things probably cost five dollars to make and you're probably paying for each pair 5 times over every night. you try to squeeze money out of me, i leave.

Dear Tiger Woods:
you're not fooling anybody

Dear Risk computer game:
i love you but you're ruining my life

Dear 50" LCD flatscreen TV:
you are a dirty temptress. i told you already that i don't have the extra money so stop sneaking your way into my dreams.

Dear deer that i did not see or shoot:
you are very sneaky and i can't figure out if i just picture a bad spot or if you smelled me a mile away. i'm going to figure it out, but in any case, there's no way i'm spraying deer pee on me.

Dear Rain:
STOP IT


Sincerely,

Nick