I swear not a day went by in my old studio life that I didn’t get a call like this.
The bands would always tell me they had x number of buyers ready to buy their CD and when they got paid for them, they would pay the studio time. My patented answer was always, “pre sell and collect the money first…”
That never happened.
When I find music or artists I dig, I beat them to death listening over and over. Then when those have run their course, I go on a new search. Now I’m on a search. I’ve been using Pandora and Spotify to find new artists. The genres I like are tough ones to find new music. I love jazz, progressive jazz, and progressive “prog” rock.
Sometimes I find cool new artists on Pandora or Spotify and forget about them. So here I’m going to keep a list of cool music and musicians so I can find them later. Here we go:
The lovely lass and I decided we wanted to go out on the town last night. We are always wanting to find some nice live jazz music to listen to. We’d love to find a live jazz band playing some Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, Count Basie, Dave Brubek. This ain’t New York though. It is Salt Lake.
We found a local club here in Salt Lake called the Red Door. The Red Door is a martini bar downtown which boasts “live jazz” every Saturday night. We were stoked to listen to some live jazz and, believe it or not, experience my personal first ever martini.
The atmosphere of the club was great. Loved the mood lighting. Very New York-like. The martinis were frighteningly fantastic.
Jazz?
The live band looked the part. A trio of acoustic standup bass, jazz guitar and a small drum kit. The drummer was playing a Gretsch, my kit of choice. The band also had the look, with their suit and ties…
But the music wasn’t jazz. I didn’t hear one single bar of anything resembling swing. Instead, the band was covering pop and rap tunes. They played straight ahead 4/4 cover tunes of Doctor Dre, Macklemore, and from the movie The Breakfast Club, Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds.
Not exactly John Coltrane.
We didn’t stick around long enough to see if they played Wang Chung.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a great martini in Salt Lake City, check out the Red Door. If you’re looking for great live jazz in Salt Lake, I’ll have to get back to you on that…
It has been a few years. Time to put in a new template here. I’ve installed a theme here which allows the site to be viewed with a clean look on desktop computers, tablets and smart phones.
Now you can enjoy Pro Sound Blog on any device. The design is very basic and I’m sure I’ll make some tweaks to the look over time. But for now it is set for any device. Check it out…
Greetings. Yes, it has been a while. I’ve been so involved in my other business ventures in the golf and web development worlds that my audio and gigging has reduced to a very small part of what I do. Unfortunate in some ways, but good in others. I do need to play more drums and I’d love to get a new gig, as long as I don’t have to rehearse every Tuesday and Thursday night with a bunch of drunks and stoners.
I’m posting today because tomorrow I’m stepping back into the twilight zone of music. Back into Spinal Tap. Here are the details as I know them at this point and I’m sure the story will get more entertaining as I do the gig.
I’ve been asked to help a very nice cat, a guitar player, mix his album. I’ll not be mixing on my gear. Oh no. I’m going to mix at his place on his PARIS system. He’s got an old Macintosh G3 running Paris. Paris, for those who don’t know, is one of the oldest DAWs (digital audio workstations) out there. The system was very nice in the day, somewhere back in the early 2000’s. I made some great sounding music on that system. These days I use Cubase 6.x which has far more capabilities than that old system by Ensoniq.
The Spinal Tap Part
I heard that the drum tracks are three channels: kick, snare, overhead (mono). Um. Shit. That’s not good. The whole setup is max 16 tracks. I fear that the original tracking quality will suck. I fear some Radio Shack microphones and the rest. Half this session will probably be me trying to help this poor guy learn how to record music, setup mics and all that kind of thing.
I received a preview CD of the tracks, mixed and not processed, EQ’d, or anything. The tunes are 80’s rock with some wailing guitars. It is a guitarist’s project. The vocals leave a lot to be desired and are very rough, pitch wise, performance wise and especially dynamically.
This guy is a nice guy and thinks highly of my engineering skills. I’m sure I’ll be able to make his stuff sound much better than the original tracks, but I’m not going to be able to make it sound like Pink Floyd or anything like that.
More to come…