SO what ezackly is preproduxion and why do I find mispelled words entertaining? Or is that mispelt? Preproduction is getting the tunes ready to record. Most of us do all this ourselves and call it ready. Seems fairly straight up, figure out intros and ending and you're good to go yeah? Here's some stuff to think about. First up, record the tunes at practice somehow. Don't get fancy. You can even use your phone. This seems fairly duh and you probably do that. Uh oh. I'm boring myself again... If the band is too loud, put a piece of masking tape over the mic and keep moving it away until you get a relatively undistorted sound. Make sure your seat belt is buckled and start the car. Place foot firmly on the brake and shift into .... Okay screw all that. send me an mp3 of the song you recorded and I'll give you a free evaluation of strong and weak areas as I see it. It's just easier this way. Less typing of the obvious, more fun. Preproduction is sorting out the weak areas and defining the strengths. There's actually a fair amount to it and every tune is different. So rather than typing us into a coma I'll rant about something. Man there is some serious crap on the radio these days. I've been listening to CFOX, CBC2 and JRFM, and a few classic rock stations lately, and even to the top 40 computer generated music stations once in a while. Radio has always been crap, and maybe I'm just an ancient cranky bastard, but it seems to me it's become worse than ever. I mean, back in the day we had horrid drivel too, punctuated by occasional moments of good music. Crap like Neil Sedaka, Captain and Tenille, Dan fucking Hill. As my cat put it so succinctly the other day: Urk urk urk hurl. Radio is like my guitar playing. It goes like this: crap, crap, crap, genius, crap crap genius, and sometimes, crapcrapcrapcrap.... all day long, no genius. Nowadays it's just all crap, all the time. A veritable crapfest of drooling hacks spewing endless over edited autotuned lifeless uninspired perfection, or playing ancient crap that wasn't very good in the first place. We built this city on rock and roll.... urk urk urk. Anyways... The digital revolution has given the industry all the power so they turfed the talent and inserted the homogenized packaged dweebs. Mind you... the eighties sucked worse. That was just an awful decade. Come to think of it the seventies had a lot of crap too. Wait. In the 60's the 1910 Fruit Gum Company had a big hit with "yummy yummy yummy I got love in my tummy". I guess it doesn't matter where or when you go, there's gonna be lots of formulaic record industry driven crap being driven into your ears. Nowadays they do it with overcompressed icepicks of treble and bowel humping extended bass, back in the day it was heaping scoops of sugary brain sludge. And while I'm at it, an open letter to CBC 2: Stop with the overcompressed girls singing cutesy kittens and sunshine with mandolins and acoustics giggle tee hee urk urk BLARGH. Okay so radio has always sucked. Maybe there's just too many idiots in the world to fight it. The secret must be to write complete crap and you'll be successful as fuck. The clue was there all along: the first sylable in "success" is "suck". What baffles my ass is with all the great music out there why they can't figure out what people might actually enjoy listening to. I'm talking new music type stations here. Classic rock is all figured with teams of marketing execs researching the shit out of idiots who want to listen to the same old garbage that reminds them of a few good moments in an otherwise shitty little life. Good God I'm cynical. Sincere apologies to anyone who happens to like classic rock or anything else I've dissed. In my defense, I'm a bitter and horrid old bastard who doesn't like anything. There are hours and hours of inspired music performed by extremely talented people in all genres out there. Great music is all over the place if you look for 2 seconds. I figure the lack of new good music is because, as ranted about previously, the business of music is all about promotion and sales. It's entirely about money and When you get into the biz up to the radio level there's a lot of it flying around. Money makes people go completely insane or stupid, and often both. Money has more power than religion or politics, more power than love or empathy. So what you wind up with is a bunch of people clamoring for a piece of the pie who will believe with all their heart and soul that a crappy rehashed bland formulaic pile of musical brain farts is a great song. Which is not to say that given the chance at a piece of said pie I wouldn't turn into a complete suction dweeb myself. If I was in charge of a radio station I'd be right there with pockets extended playing any old crap that somebody threw at me if it was tied to a dollar. I'd be in there with them leaking tears of emotion and pronouncing their squawking musical ruin as the best thing I've ever heard. Money would be awesome to have I suspect. That's still just a theory at this point. It occurs to me there are actually a few good tunes on radio these days. Just like it was back in the day. There's always a handful that float out of any given decade. Which of course classic rock stations pounce on like piranha and overplay the shit out of until the tune is just red globs of viscera leaking from the radio speakers. all the best music is on the internet, and not that hard to find if you look. But really, there's no hope. Just try and have a good time.
cosmictunes7