Of course as I went to do this, my music host ate itself. Well…the music will be back in a few hours.

Visit the new page here. (Eventually.)

As the MCP said: “end of line”

Quartz Composer + Ableton Live midi visualization from Luke Stark on Vimeo.

The holidays yielded a couple new things for digital music creation: some upgraded software and a new control surface.  As much as I really like the Monome, the last 200 units sold out before I even realized the email saying they were available had arrived. Talk about market demand!

So anyway, here’s some new bits…enjoy!

To that end, here’s a couple recent pieces done on commission. As more accrue, I’ll drop them in the showcase.

I can’t really say what’s right, but I know what doesn’t work. Most genres are loaded with baggage, public expectations that music in a genre will sound something like the top artists also working in that genre. This is not unreasonable, but it makes the average genre fairly useless as a descriptor for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not standing on some pillar going “my music defies categorization.” Hardly. I’m just saying that my music has a bit of dissociative personality disorder.

I’ve been browsing a list of music “genes” from the Music Genome Project trying to build a list of things that apply to my music overall. This is what I have so far.

Structures

• Basic Rock Song Structures
• Interesting Song Structure

Roots

• Electronica Roots
• Trance Roots
• Rock Roots

Instrumentation

• Electric Instrumentation
• Emphasis on Varied Instrumentation
• Mixed Acoustic and Electric Instrumentation

Musical qualities

• Film Music Qualities
• Progressive Rock Qualities

Influences

• Classical Music Influences
• Downtempo Influences
• Electronica Influences
• Folk Influences
• New Age Influences
• Rock Influences
• World Music Influences

If I try to distill that list down into a single word or two, it becomes too easy to lose what it is.

So…frustration!

The final production would be a project with attribution for all involved artists and the music (credits, links to art and whatever page you desire) as well as a write up on Deviant Art as well as all press outlets for the music (ReverbNation, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, etc…)

This is an opportunity for people to take the art they’re proud of, combine it to produce something greater than the sum of it’s parts and get exposure by sharing it with the world.

Questions: (drop a email/message if you have any questions not answered here.)

1) “Licensing?” You would of course retain all rights to your art. You would be granting the right to combine your art with music into a single derivative work (the project) that itself would be licensed under a “Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0″ license.

2) “Can I share/post/fileshare it (the final project) around?” Of course! That’s kind of the point. We’ll create something we’re proud of and willing to share.

3) “Does this mean I won’t be able to sell prints or license the art any further?” It does NOT mean that. You are allowing a license to make a derivative work that combines your art and mine, and allowing any fans we have to share that work (the combined work, not your art by itself.)

4) “Are you making money?” No. Not even a little. Sorry. It’s completely non-commercial.

5) “Can I make money?” With regards to your art, yes. If you want to (for example) sell calendars of the work you contributed that bear the project name or logo you may do so, but so can all the other contributors. It does NOT let you use the art others have contributed in a product.

5) “Do I get to see it before it gets released?” Sure thing! Production snapshots will be made and privately distributed to all artists involved. If at any point before release you change your mind or feel that the project is not appropriate for your art, we will remove it. No questions.

If you have other questions, please send them to info1(at)lukestark.com or comment here.

Like today.

Not.

Today has been awesome! What you see on the left is a thumbnail of the waveform representing the first two tracks off the new album project. Clicking on it will show you the whole thing. Note the spikes, the beautiful turgid transients. Those are the very transients usually lacking from commercial music these days. Reclaim your volume control! When listening to these tracks I enjoy a distinct sense of Oomph. I will go so far as to describe the music as punchy.

Pugilistic Audio. A left hook of sound injected into your cochlea.

Not only have these tracks been a true pleasure to write (using the new “Composers On Pork” method ala Greg Bacon) the resulting pieces have been chock full of dynamics changes, wide chasm-like dynamic changes. This is not for listening on the subway using ipod headphones. You won’t hear half of it over the ambient noise. No no. This album is going to want you to have headphones, or at least a relatively quiet room. The loud parts are very loud and the quiet parts are very quiet. Of course that sort of kills the whole “listen to it in your car” if you drive a rattle-wagon like we do…

…but sacrifices must be made.

I need a dedicated artist, or at least a small army of mildly interested ones. I’m trying to figure out a way to do what amounts to  slideshow or storyboard. The technology is simple, it’s the content that’s hard to find. I’ve grabbed a bunch of inspirational (for my current project) art from the net and built a short sequence of one particular track, and it works…but commissioning that much art is expensive and I can’t release what I have because it’s just a hack…I don’t have permission from the artists. Granted this isn’t a commercial project, but better safe than sorry. What I need is to find one or more artists interested in a shared project of art and music. Know any? I’ll have to think on this and post more later.

Doing a musical story is tricky without lyrics. You have to work with a reduced vocabulary (literally) and try to musically emote a story. I always worked in the framework of a song…so..verse chorus bridge coda etc. But I’m doing instrumentals sooo, why work that way? Habit mostly, but the concept of Greg’s tunes gave me the idea to experiment with short format a/b pieces which I string together. Using small tunes I can craft each one as a musical “word/phrase/emote” and string them together to tell my story. I’m experimenting now and I have to say…it works for me.

When I get done mixing the first few tunes today I’ll most likely share something.

So I’m ostensibly working on my second “album” which is going well and I’m trying to take what is usually a very fluid (read: disorganized) process and squeeze it into a more formal plan of attack. The sophmore album attempt has a few goals behind it that I’m fiddling with:

1. a more related sound between tracks
2. a unifying theme (conceptually)
3. recurring motifs across tracks
4. have each song tell a single part of an overarching story
5. create and retain artifacts of production (notes, art, etc)
6. have a common workflow for all tracks

The last two are part of an attempt to connect with you all and share my creative process. Hearing the album at the end is great, but I think I can tell a story with more than just music. It might be interesting to peruse images and files of in-production work to fill out the “backstage/how it was made” sort of curiosity people might have. Dare I say, in-studio video? (Now that might be truly yawn-inducing.)

The first four are an attempt to simply make the final output better and more compelling.

Composer, improve thyself.

What came before

Early in my music-making career I wanted to be “a star” or at least wildly successful, grinding lesser artists beneath my jackbooted heel, recreating scenes from “Caligula” backstage, and buying my parents that nice house on the lake. Such a great dream!

Reality time: I’m not that motivated, nor do I wear jackboots. I do however make music and to date I’ve been putting a piece or two online from time to time, then taking them down, then toying with the idea of distribution of an *actual* compact disk but never quite getting there. What stopped me?

Lawyers.

I’ve seen “deals” that new artists get. There’s a new book published every week on “making it” in the music business. Every document is typeset in some font called “Flyspeck 3.” Nothing sucks the drive out of me like trying to understand old-school licensing and distribution. There I was, plinking away not really doing much. My output was low. Months would go by without me looking at my music. The mechanics of doing “the business” killed my motivation to create.

What we have now

Hel-lo interwebz! I guess I should thank all those music pirates. The traditional music industry monetization models are in ruins. Somewhere along the line I started to realize that it’s statistically unlikely I’m going to become a star the old way. So what shall I do about it? I would love to make a living from my music. Do I think I ever will? Probably not. Do I have a low-risk way to find out?

Yes and so do you.

Here’s the recipe:

1. I make music. My way. My (non) style. No need to “target the demographic.”
2. Give it away.
3. C…

Whoah whoah whoah. Come again?

Really. Give it away. In this brave new world perfect copies of digital goods are trivial to make and distribute. The value in my music is no longer based on the scarcity of a plastic bit-encoded disk. The music industry has fought to keep the value there for 10+ years and lost. It’s over. Give it up. Litigation doesn’t work. Distribution monopoly doesn’t work. Campaigns to shame consumers for copying DOESN’T WORK.

So (says the artist) how do I make a living? Well (says I) is that why you make music? To make a living?

Well yes and no, (says the artist) I make music because I have to. It’s inside me. I also want to make a living doing something I love: music.

Ok (says I) then unless you want to have a day job while letting the music out, you’d better consider how to get your fans to support you. How do I do that? Why would they do that?

Back to the recipe:

1. Make music.
2. Give it away.
3. Create a digital presence.
4. Connect with fans.
5. Learn what your fans really value.
6. Deliver that thing as a sideline to giving away the music.

It’s being done and you don’t have to be a rockstar with a huge fanbase to do it. If you have zero fans right now, you could still do this, it’ll just take you more time. Given the number of humans on the planet, there is a %99.999 chance that you have some fans out there. You just have to find them. The internet is your tool.

Let me just say this, now that I’ve “digitally distributed” my music, I spend about 20 minutes each night answering an email or two or seeking out a niche online community of people who might enjoy my music. I introduce myself, and just try to make friends. I’m not selling these people anything. I already gave it away. Now at this point I’m just trying to connect with people and make great music…

…and that is a lot more fun.

I started thinking about all this after seeing a video that I’ll embed here for you. It’s ~30 minutes long and you should consider getting a drink, putting your phone on vibrate and watching the whole thing. I’m off to work on some new music. Enjoy!

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

Starkaudio is available though a number of online channels including (eventually…processing time) the iTunes Music Store and the Amazon Music Store.  Of course you can get it all right here too.

One music-related thing I did do a few weeks back was generate visualization for a few more tracks an upload them to YouTube. It’s nothing fancy, just screencaptures of the iTunes visualizer…but it seems to work well enough (and a couple random stoners leave me entertaining comments.) I did them in “kinda’-sorta’ HD. If you have the bandwidth I strongly suggest using the “high quality” mode to view them. I’m looking for other visualization tools, so if you know of any do let me know.

I also neglected to mention or post any word of “Plectro Magnetica” here. It’s actually a candidate for vocals, but the vocals written have been allowed to sit on my machine for a month or so to “ripen or rot” and I think they’re doing the latter. I liked what I had, but now that I’ve let it sit…well…let’s just say that I was shooting for concept album and jumped off the deep end into a space that reminds me of a badly done 2112 rip-off. Needless to say I won’t embarrass myself by sharing that little whoops. Sorry Dad.

So there it is. Enjoy!

(This proves I can post from my phone again…was broken.)

Mastering is the process where the final mix of a song or record is taken and “massaged” into something that producers/artists think will sound great when played on almost any hardware (car stereo, radio, PC speakers, super-duper stereo loudspeakers…whatever.) Mastering engineers can be paid major-ching for working the mastering mojo. The process has been around for years and years and it does/can make great recordings sound incredible and mediocre ones sound good.

The problem is that our brains and ears often tell us that louder is better. If you hear two songs on the radio that have relatively equal “musical quality” (say two pop songs) but one has been made a few decibels louder on average by the mastering process, your ears will tell you that the louder one sounds better. This is where the problem started. Record producers and artists starting asking that their music be mastered “hotter” and louder. Well there’s a terrible price to be paid when you over compress a piece of music.

Watch this excellent video on the price your music pays from being “squashed” by the mastering process.

I myself have been guilty of over-compressing my music in an attempt to make it compete with other music, equally mangled. Well no more! From here on out the phrase of the day will be “high dynamic range” because my music revolves around telling a story and who wants to listen to a story when it’s just being shouted at them?

Check out http://turnmeup.org for more information or to get involved, and remember when you listen to my music, turn it up!

If you’re one of the really connected youtube/facebook/digg/whatever people, by all means share this video around since I’m nothing if not an attention whore.

If youtube-quality makes you retch, you can download the high quality one at http://lukestark.com/verse

“Intro from ‘Verse” - An electronic passage through spinning fields of light and sound. Break out the bong!

Got some GREAT pictures of the sunset over Siesta Key today. I’ll post them soon.

Merry almost Christmas!

p.s. For those who missed it…Greg posted my hack of his song “The Marlin Spike”.

http://lukestark.com/tracks/Sketch14.mp3

Follow his blog to hear it and lots of other original and traditional (awesome) tunes.

http://lukestark.com/tracks/BrownianMotion.mp3

http://lukestark.com/tracks/1m18.mp3