G-G-GARTH RICHARDSON

On the far right is the producer of bands like Atreyu, Chevelle, Rage Against the Machine and MANY more. One of his buds in the biz happens to be our mixer Joe Primeau (left). Both of these guys have seen the inside of nearly every decent studio from LA to Toronto.

Garth stopped by the Bag studios to borrow a stapler and say hi to Joe. They're both Canadian so, hockey was discussed even though it's frakkin' July.

Garth told many wild stories none of which can be repeated. Those are the best kind. Party on Garth.

WOODSTOCK 40 YEARS LATER

It's considered by many to be the biggest and most powerful event in music history. The impact was so huge that now, 40 years later, Woodstock is being celebrated so widely that those who weren't born yet when Yasgur's farm was rocked by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ritchie Havens and the rest want in on the legacy.

With that in mind, the Bag crew has been working on production pieces that will flash you back to the summer of love. They'll begin showing up on all Brown Bag services tomorrow.

FRIENDED THIS GUY YET? (click on pic)

PRO TOOLS WORK FLOW TIP

Ever had to go back to a project and update it? How many times were files missing or not labeled properly? Getting into better work flow habits can lessen your headaches and make your life easier.

The first habit to get into is to name your audio files! You may be familiar with what’s what while you’re working on the project, but one month down the road you will have no idea what audio_01, audio_02 is. It’s also a good idea to consolidate your files before moving on from a project. You can do so by highlighting each track in the timeline, making sure that the area highlighted starts at zero and continues until all the audio in the track ends. Then under the edit menu select “Consolidate Regions” (or use the shortcut option>shift>3) You will have then created one continuous file starting at zero. Once you have done this to all of the final audio go to the regions bin on the right side of the edit window and in the drop down menu click on “Select”, “Unused” Then choose “Clear”. The next window that appears will ask you if you want to “remove” or “delete” the files. Choose remove. Now that you have just the final audio in the session go under the File Menu and select “Save Copy In..” and check the box “All Audio Files” in the “Items to Copy” dialog that appears. This will create a new folder with just the final audio along with the session file. Leaving your original session untouched. You can either trash the original files or move them off to another drive. One last thing I like to do is open the new session I created and make sure it doesn’t ask for any missing audio and everything plays fine. Doing this will help remove the clutter from your drives as well as insuring that if the project file ever gets corrupted or you have to use the files in an editor other than Pro Tools you can simple drag the wav files into another DAW and have them all line up in perfect sync!

QUICK TIP

Tube mics are more common these days. Probably because some are made in China and you can pick one up for around $300. The sound is warm and the electronics are even warmer.

To help dissipate heat away from the capsule and avoid damage, mount the mic upside down as seen in the pic.

SECRET SAUCE

Some of the sound you hear on Brown Bag libraries comes from this strange and wonderful piece of analog machinery. Ok, it's not strange, it's a classic Studer A810. It weighs more than a Fiat but, when it comes to getting certain sounds, there is no substitute. It resides in a remote, semi-secret, temperature controlled location for completely fabricated security reasons.

Yes, tape is obsolete at radio stations and almost everywhere else,however, it still has a significant place in the recording biz. We look at it as a plug in. Whatever goes through it will absorb it's characteristics. There are parameters to tweak as well.

This baby does 30 i.p.s and has lots of extras. The speaker is perfect for checking your audio in mono and summed stereo. The VUs are great for mastering. Better than digital for sure. It's biased for 499 and calibrated at +6 so you can drive it hard.

We don't exactly fire it up everyday but, when we need it, nothing else will do. Software developers have been hammering away at tape emulation for years and have yet to nail the uniqueness of this magnificent beast.

Fun Fact: that sticker with the green dot in the upper right was placed there in 1999 by an engineer to signify Y2K compliance. That's way too cool for us to ever remove it.

WHERE'S THE BEEF?

Your tweaking some sounds for your next master piece, yet they are sounding a bit thin.

How do you remedy this? Do you squash them with even more compression? You could add more low end but that may muddy up your sound. So, how do you add that little extra juice, aka, "The Beef".

There are a wide variety of tools that add, subtract, raise, lower, squash, squish, shine and mangle your sound. That extra oomph can be achieved by using a distortion effect. Yes, distortion. There are countless varieties of distortion, from smooth to utter mayhem. We are talking about the subtle use of this magical phenomena in audio and sound. Distortion can add "The Beef" tout de suite (that's French for immediately). Dial up an overdrive or distortion effect and start tweaking, you will quickly hear your sound transforming. You are looking for the sweet spot of saturation to add robustness to your sound. Experimentation is always the best method. Try positioning the effect in different placements within your inserts or effects chain. Remember, the key word here is subtle for you may only need to tweak the parameters ever so slightly depending on your effect of choice.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Radio formats have become more standardized. Music research and economics have made that inevitable. The wild days of free form radio only existed because there was very little to lose. No pot of gold to protect. As always, information changes things. So that explains music but, what about imaging? There is still very little in the way of research on it and it isn't tied so directly to economics. Why then does so much imaging project a similar vibe?

This is another topic with no definitive answer. Imitating success to advance your career is certainly part of the equation but, we'd like to suggest something less obvious.

People are often defined by limitations. If you want to play football and you're 130lbs, you don't play on the line. You learn to run fast and catch passes or kick field goals. Bending that concept a bit, radio imaging forces a variety of limitations that deny individuality. Similar deadlines (and other time crunch factors), similar formats, similar tools, similar objectives, and similar job structure can easily add up to a similar final product.

Another factor that can lead to sameness is the web. The sharing of acid loops, drops, sfx and plug in settings doesn't promote individuality. It leads to McImaging. This is important because imaging, like many other aspects of radio, needs some fresh ingredients. Microwaving another McPromo ain't makin' it.

Try to find some time now and then to monkey with your plugs and make your own presets. Wipe your brain clean of what others are doing and consider what you think is cool. Develop a thumbprint. A blues guitarist doesn't have to sing or say his name for listeners to know who it is. They know from his style. Most players are using the same scales, instrumentation and subject matter so, style is everything. It's not such a stretch to apply that to imaging. You may be using the same voice, same imaging package and same plug ins as another station in your format but if you bring your own style to the party all that means squat. You'll really be in the creative game and isn't that why you produce imaging for a living?

A NEW KIND OF TRIBUTE

It seems there's always been a need for people to laugh, cry, gasp, smile, frown or be scared half to death in the faux reality of entertainment. Whether it's a dramatic stick drawing on a cave wall, a Shakespearean play or a Spielberg movie, folks just love a corkscrew loop on the emotional roller coaster of escapist media. Of course, it's not always fake.

When famous people die, many are genuinely sad or even overwhelmed. At the very least, they're extremely interested in information and circumstances related to the passing. That leads to a flood of media attention. We mentioned this in our June 26 post on tribute production.

We feel compelled to follow up on that post by sharing another tribute we found. Here's the link...http://billietweets.com/. This piece is another in the fast rising groundswell of user produced content. It's fresh, unique and clever. It doesn't have the production value or emotional tug of say a long form HBO promo but, it grabs you just the same. It has originality going for it and that's a lot.

How did a microblog time-suck like twitter become a production tool and creative inspiration in and of itself? Hard to say but a simple theory is it's new and when you get a new toy, you play with it ferociously at first until you've squeezed every last bit of fun out of it, or broken it. You experiment with unintended uses to see what is possible. At least these are things that a child or creative adult would do. As far as breaking it, you've all seen the fail whales.

In an age where everything feels like it's been done before, twitter and the like can give things a fresh edge. Underneath, the billietweets piece is just another MJ tribute. It uses video, audio and text, all pre existing tools. It doesn't even add creative content, it only follows the words of the song. Despite all of that, it FEELS new. You haven't quite seen it before.

The deal is, technology changes quickly but the human condition, not so much. Computers haven't stopped us from laughing, crying and all the rest. At one time we gathered in the town square to get info and catch up. Fast forward to the water cooler and then fast forward again to web. Somewhere in there, was a time when we used to stare at the radio, completely awed by what came out of it.

All the buzz now is, how will radio find it's new place by making nice with the internet? How will it avoid being run over by twitter and the other cutely named devourers of attention? We don't have the answers but, as creative people, we can certainly see that the new web toys are demanding to be played with more often. They challenge us all to find unintended uses with unexpected results. That doesn't sound like the end of radio, it just sounds like fun.